Ever since the Covid pandemic, “Spaniards have continued to identify politicians as the country’s main problem, above unemployment, the independence of Catalonia, corruption or anything else,” said Paco Camas, head of public opinion in Spain for polling firm Ipsos. “That helps explain that reaction by people toward their leaders [in Paiporta].”
Those affected by the floods have two main grievances — that they were not given enough warning by the regional government before the weather event hit, even though information was available from the AEMET national meteorological agency; and that the response to the tragedy has been slow and perfunctory, with volunteers having to pick up the slack when rescue workers and the military have not been visible on the ground.
The perceived deficiencies have attracted scrutiny of Spain’s system of crisis alerts and of its territorial model. (The country consists of 17 regions, with varying degrees of autonomy from the central government.)
Lola García, a political commentator at La Vanguardia newspaper, compared Spain’s response to the 2021 floods in Germany, a country that also has a decentralized regional structure.
“Political decentralization in [the German] case is [based on] a collaborative premise, with … a minimum of institutional loyalty, which here has been disappearing at an alarming rate,” she said.
Many commentators are comparing the public reaction to the flooding crisis to “11-M”, the Madrid train bombings of 2004, which saw a backlash against the conservative Popular Party (PP) administration after it misled voters over who was responsible for the attack. The outcry led to the party’s being voted out of office.