Catastrophic floods in Spain on Oct. 29 killed at least 229 people and caused billions of euros’ worth of damage. The hardest-hit region was Valencia, a wealthy, industrious province in the country’s northeast, where at least 221 people died—many of them carried away in their cars or drowned in underground garages.
A few days after the floods, King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia visited the worst-affected areas of Valencia, alongside Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Valencia’s conservative regional president, Carlos Mazón. The delegation was pelted with mudballs and insults by citizens furious at what they saw as state negligence before, during, and after the disaster.
Sánchez has since deployed 17,000 troops and police and pledged €16.6 billion (around $17.2 billion) to Valencia, but the cleanup operation was initially led by thousands of volunteers, including members of far-right fringe groups eager to exploit anger with the establishment.
Their presence amid the mud and carnage in Valencia was undoubtedly opportunistic. In European Union elections this spring, a new anti-establishment party, Se Acabó La Fiesta (“The Party Is Over”), gained its first seats in Brussels, fueled by popular anger at a political class seen by many Spaniards—and not just those who back fringe groups—as hopelessly corrupt and self-serving.
Mazón and Sánchez have been quick to blame each other for the scale of the disaster. Mazón, a member of the center-right People’s Party (PP), says the central government should have intervened in the rescue operation faster. Sánchez points to the fact that, in Spain, emergency response is regional administrations’ responsibility.
Both politicians’ arguments ultimately rest on the premise that this was a freak weather occurrence, almost impossible to predict or contain. Sánchez said the floods were brutal proof that “climate change kills.” Mazón, who is under pressure from his electorate to resign, has called them “apocalyptic” and claimed that there was “no previous reference or experience that could be remotely comparable [to this disaster].”
To an extent, this is true.
Although Valencia has experienced severe floods before, the scale of damage and loss of life on Oct. 29 made it one of the country’s worst-ever natural disasters. However, there is a recent precedent elsewhere in Europe, comparable in almost all details to the Spanish floods.
In July 2021, heavy rainfall caused severe flooding across central Europe.The worst-affected countries were Germany and Belgium, where 196 and 43 people were killed respectively. Before critics could blame authorities for poor preparation, Belgian Interior Minister Annelies Verlinden said there was “no script for a water bomb [
