Death toll reaches 217 in Spain and king and prime minister are harassed

A visit by the King and Queen of Spain and the country’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, to flood-hit areas in Valencia ended in confusion this Sunday (3). A crowd threw mud, stones and objects at the entourage, hitting King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia in the face.

The number of fatalities rose to 217 after the passage of torrential rains associated with the Isolated High Level Depression (Dana) last week.

Left-wing parties and social movements accuse the far-right Popular Party, which governs the Valencia region, of encouraging attacks against the prime minister’s government as a way of freeing itself from responsibility for the tragedy.

Hundreds of volunteers and residents of Paiporta interrupted the cleaning of streets affected by the “flood of the century” that hit Spain last Tuesday (5) and protested against the authorities with shouts of “murderers” and “out”. In the city, one of the epicenters of the tragedy, 62 people died due to the rains.

At the beginning of the visit, a broomstick was also thrown towards Sánchez. He was surrounded by his security team, who opened umbrellas to protect the delegation from the mud and stones thrown by residents.

While the professionals tried to set up a security cordon around the king, a police cavalry unit intervened to push away the protesters. At least one of the queen’s bodyguards suffered a visible wound to his forehead.

Most of the residents’ attacks were directed at Pedro Sánchez, who ended up abandoning the delegation for security reasons. The king and queen insisted for another hour on talking to people and trying to calm things down. With his face and clothes stained with mud, he continued to walk along one of the city’s main streets and talked to residents, but ended up leaving the place.

The Spaniards are pelting President Pedro Sanchez with stones for falling into the flood 1 week later because “they did not ask for help”
They did shit to the car pic.twitter.com/UVwJMduZFV

— ElBuni (@therealbuni) November 3, 2024

Videos circulating on social media show the angry population, throwing objects at the cars of the official delegation. The incidents led authorities to suspend the king and queen’s visit to the city of Chiva, where they would go next.

Elected in May 2023 to be president of the government of Valencia, just like a governor in Brazil, one of the first decisions of the former PP president, Carlos Mazón, was to eliminate the ‘Valencian Emergency Unit’. It was the first step in the restructuring of the public sector announced by the Valencian Government of Mazón.

Mazón is accused of ignoring weather warnings issued by climate authorities. Two weeks before the tragedy, the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) sent a series of warnings about the risk of Dana falling in the eastern region of Spain, mainly in Valencia.

The warnings were ignored by the government of Valencian president Carlos Mazón, who had the help of the current president of the PP, and exponent of the extreme right in the country, Núñez Feijóo to hold Pedro Sánchez, his political opponent in the national dispute, accountable.

Feijóo declared that Aemet and Pedro Sánchez were responsible for not providing the necessary information to the Valencian Generalitat.