Floods can make, or break, politicians in Europe. In Germany, Gerhard Schröder’s response to the Elbe flooding in 2002 helped him win an improbable victory in that year’s federal elections. Conversely, Armin Laschet torpedoed his own chances in 2021 after he was caught joking during a visit to a flood-hit town. Elsewhere, Giorgia Meloni managed to emerge from flooding in Emilia-Romagna in 2023 with her reputation intact, while in Hungary this September, the opposition politician Péter Magyar seized floods as an opportunity to criticise the Viktor Orbán government. Two important qualities most voters expect of their leaders are competent crisis management and empathy. Floods put both to the test.
In Spain, however, there is less chance of them changing the political mood than reinforcing it. Valencia has suffered from a series of catastrophic floods, which have caused one of the worst crises in living memory in the country. The region’s official death toll is currently 214, and the Spanish government has deployed the army to help manage the response.
The response of different layers of government has led to a backlash. First, the regional administration in Valencia was slow to issue warnings to stay at home last Tuesday (29 October), despite Spain’s national weather authority having warned for days about the prospect of heavy rainfall – the local government did not send out the emergency alert until Tuesday evening. By then it was too late: many people were trapped at work or on the roads. Carlos Mazón, Valencia’s regional president, also claimed earlier in the afternoon that the rain was letting up.
The national government isn’t necessarily blameless either. In disasters, the central government in Madrid can assume emergency powers, taking over crisis response from regional authorities. But it did not do this.
The Valencian government did not authorise the receipt of emergency funds from Madrid until Saturday. There are reasons why it avoided doing this. Relations between Spain’s central government and the regions can be politically sensitive, and the former stepping in could complicate rather than smooth things out. Any excuses will, however, sound hollow in the context of such loss of life.
There will, doubtless, be investigations and inquiries. It’s also safe to assume that those will be mixed in with Spain’s highly polarised political environment. The centre-right People’s Party (PP) governs Valencia, while the Socialists are in power nationally. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the PP’s national leader, has made some digs at the Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez and his government. But Sánchez and Mazón have both largely avoided the political fray. It is hard to see that either the government or the opposition have much to gain from what will come across as an equal-opportunity screw-up.
Instead, the mood is maybe best summed up by the angry response Felipe VI, the Spanish king, and his wife received when they visited Valencia after the floods. Venting at Sánchez would be one thing, but throwing mud at the King is another. It reflects a general feeling that the political class, in both Valencia and Madrid, has failed. If the aftermath turns into a big finger-pointing exercise, it will deepen that anti-politics sentiment.
What has taken root in Spain is an extreme example of the same doom loop that afflicts politics across much of the Western world. Political parties try to sharpen their partisan differences, while nothing changes from the viewpoint of voters. This fuels a disillusionment with the state of politics that empowers extremes. Politicians try to lean into those extremes in response, producing more polarisation, and then more jadedness.
A version of this piece originally ran on Eurointelligence.
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