The flames, which destroyed more than 30,000 hectares of forest in the Commonwealth of Valencia, served as kerosene for partisan warfare. Political conflict escalated in the revolutions, and fire management and prevention were on the agenda at both the Diputación de Alicante and the Generalitat. Everything indicates that the atmosphere of conflict will only intensify in what has already become a kind of everything against everybody.
Gabriela Bravo, Minister of Justice, Home Affairs and Public Administration, will appear at the Permanent Delegation of the Courts this Thursday to report on Generalitat’s actions in response to the fires this summer. But Bravo’s prominence was not enough for the parliamentary right. The first is that he questions that his response will be limited to fires and does not deal with points like the fatal accident at the Medusa festival or the train crash in Bejís. The main opposition group, the PP, has been demanding for days that the speaker in Parliament be Ximo Puig, head of Consell. The trustees, María José Catalá, stated that they will continue to move in this direction. Because PP, as he says, “will not accept Puig’s escape strategy”, because they feel it should be his to explain what went wrong during the train incident in Castellón that entered a burning area. Cs also joined this strategy. Mireia Mollà, minister for the environment, questions that only Bravo will report on the fires while “it remains in hiding without any explanation”.
The attack against the Mullah did not come from Cs alone. Diputación de Alicante, led by Carlos Mazón, also directed his attacks at the councilor from Elche. It did so institutionally, and Diputación itself issued a statement warning that the Generalitat had “blocked 43 bushfire prevention plans in the province of Alicante.” In this document, Environmental Provincial Representative Miguel Ángel Sánchez described the Mullah’s administration as “chaotic and disastrous”, saying that he was incapable of carrying out these prevention plans and assured that there were 101 municipalities in the Community that lacked them. plans. At the same time, he stated that thanks to the different calls encouraged by the institution, a total of 56 city councils in this legislature were able to prepare fire prevention plans, and financial benefits were provided for the execution of 40 of them. He added that the Provincial General Assembly will allocate 1.5 million euros for the implementation of the fire prevention plans of the municipalities in 2023, and two million euros for afforestation works and improvement of forest masses.
The stake against the Mullah from the provincial institution was not accidental. Hours ago, Valencian spokesperson in Diputación, Gerard Fullana, publicly questioned the volume of aid allocated to fire prevention by the institution headed by Carlos Mazón (PP), comparing it to that injected by Diputación de València and said that sixty investments were secured. That’s a lot more budget. Specifically, €400,000 from Alicante and €31 million from the institution led by Toni Gaspar.
The socialists of Diputación also joined the generalized fight. Recalling that in his case it took 21 months to pay the first aid to the municipalities affected by the 2019 DANA, to request from Mazón an ambitious and realistic aid plan that is handled agilely for the municipalities affected by the fires. “Mazón can’t sell smoke and fail again in the face of a new natural disaster,” said Diputación spokesperson Toni Frances. He also demanded that assistance be coordinated with the Generalitat so that it is as efficient and effective as possible.