Valencia’s regional president travels to a luxury Madrid hotel to lament the political harassment he faces. The PP’s figurehead, temporarily pardoned, avoids the Fallas and finds listeners who respond with sympathy, starting with Madrid’s mayor, Jose Luis Martinez Almeida. From this exclusive crowd the leader does not bring his own boss, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who would rather be anywhere than be seen with the living symbol of a political corpse named Carlos Mazón. A man who appears dead but is very much alive, who eats at El Ventorro and breakfasts with businessmen who would not hire him for any role given his track record, and who collects a public salary at month end. Not like the 228 neighbors who lost their lives to the flood and had no chance to seek safety because the Generalitat he led was clumsy in crisis management. And it still directs the region, astonishing to believe. I imagine the mother of two children aged three and five who were swept away with their father, their bodies found weeks later miles from their devastated home. What must she think when she hears Mazón describe himself as a victim of the disaster that exposed his inexplicable negligence? The remarks in parliamentary sessions are equally puzzling, because Mazón tends to speak mainly at Madrid economic forums and who knows if he signs a temporary contract. He maintains a quiet profile in his homeland to avoid friction with citizens, lest he stain his name. He seeks pity. He says he is not a victim but a collateral damage, a way of saying the same thing. He is two cocktails away from asking an insurer for compensation. The spotlight centers on him, not on the 228 lives lost. He presents himself as a political martyr. A self-styled, saintly right-wing baron adrift who does not deliver, kept in office by cold calculation.
The victim narrative is a comfortable throne where the corrupt and the ineffective sit to dodge accountability or bear the consequences of their acts. The government seems to have a grudge against the speaker. The Vox-backed president of the Parliament of the Balearic Islands, who will sit in the dock for breaking the photo of women murdered by fascists and for invading the physical space of a socialist deputy in the chamber, also presents himself as a persecuted truth-seeker. Gabriel Le Senne, the island’s second authority, cites the gospels on social media to explain the current humiliation caused by his lack of anger control: Love your enemies. Tenderness by force, no thanks. He has not been charged for love but for hate speech, but details are spared as the far right’s moralizing and aggressive rhetoric continues. He remains in his post with support from a timorous PP that lacks an absolute majority, yet his boss cheers him on from Madrid. Who knows what happens when he is judged. He has trained to present himself as the perfect victim of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy that some still believe exists and lets him walk free. In this country being a convincing victim opens doors to credit or absolution. Look at Jenni Hermoso, serious, dignified, brave. The Rubiales case declared a supervisor’s sexual assault, but not everyone felt the judgment fully. The call is to resist overdramatization and demand accountability, not to imitate Le Senne and Mazón, because this is not a road map for national progress.