Were it true, man’s best line when a loss is mourned would surely be: “it was inevitable”. Tongues would untie before grief if only a death could be fate’s work entirely. Officials at a loss for words can only wish for this cop-out when comforting constituents in a calamity’s wake, even when their misbegotten policies — or outright negligence — are at fault for the casualties. Worse luck, having to console someone the death of whose loved one you’re at least partly to blame for.

I presume some version of this thought must have preyed on the Spanish bigwigs who approached regions afflicted by the cold drop that befell Spain’s Levant three Tuesdays ago.

Paiporta, one of the hardest struck, met them with booing, mudballs, wood sticks and face-covered car wreckers — all sprinkled with the most colorful end of Spain’s insult repertoire. These were mostly aimed at our socialist PM, the often-slick Pedro Sánchez who for once appeared brooding and morose, and the former (poor) singer serving as Valencia’s right-of-center regional premier, Carlos Mazón. They didn’t spare the Royal Couple, though, despite the King’s poise and calm — and the hurried attempt to repair his image. Little wonder why crowds fumed. 200 lay dead by the time these three finally deigned to show up, five days after the storm struck. An unknown number are still missing, with physical damage unquantified — let alone addressed yet — though certainly below the 400 million EUR Sánchez pledged in aid last week to the World Bank’s anti-poverty efforts.

It must have been no picnic visiting communities where death and destruction was felt to have resulted from poor flood prevention. Cold drops, as it happens, are historically routine in our neck of the woods. Though not easily comparable, previous instances of the same “weatherman’s woe” lay bare how avertable the catastrophe was this time. This rainfall level has recurred at an average of about once a century since usable records began. The statistical outlier this year was our sheer unpreparedness.

If it didn’t need to be remotely this deathly, neither was the resulting political upset doomed to spill this far beyond Spain. For three weeks post-storm, the country’s nominee to serve as EU vice-premier, Teresa Ribera, risked a thumbs-down by the euro-chamber elected on 9 June. Ursula von der Leyen wanted her new cabinet — the second European Commission she will get to lead — in place before Trump’s inauguration, if not by early December. Mrs. Pfizergate craved a show of European consensus and efficiency, stage-managed to contrast with the ever lengthier and more polarised operation to staff Washington’s federal top brass after every US election. For a brief while, Ursula’s plans looked doomed.

Spain’s problem … isn’t so much poor infrastructure as a chicanerous political class

Yet last week, the Brussels consensus finally overpowered demands for accountability and secured a greenlight to Ribera’s appointment, allowing Ursula to save face. The saga should remain, still, a testament to the potential butterfly effect of politically aggravated natural disasters anywhere in the Union to derail supranational pork-barreling of the highest order.

Spain’s problem in that crucible isn’t so much poor infrastructure as a chicanerous political class that fails to match the excellent irrigation and water management apparati that we do have. When the last such storm ripped in 1957, Franco’s regime responded with a binge-building plan to channel the area’s Turia river into the sea, thus sparing Valencia, the country’s third-most populous city, from future overflow. One trite anti-Francoist irony has it that the strongman’s supporters can point to few other legacies than hydrological infrastructure: dams, reservoirs, canals, aqueducts, irrigation and draining systems and wastewater treatment plants. That isn’t sounding so ironic now, as the damage would have proved incommensurably worse without the post-1957 works. Franco’s plan would have indeed worked wonders this time but for the inaction and poor coordination of his democratic heirs from both major parties.

Tributary rivers and ravines overflew in record time on October 29, and the villages on water’s way — more urbanised this time, making water levels rise higher and quicker — suffered the worst flash floods in a generation in the span of a few hours, catching residents, unalerted by the authorities, by utter surprise.

People trapped in waterlogged homes in the aftermath sometimes lived alongside corpses for days, without food and water. Sánchez’s infamous line captures the moral tenor of the immediate reaction: “should they need more help, let them ask for it”. Thousands of young Spaniards rushed to fill the vacuum, volunteering in mud-clearing and aid operations under conditions both unhygienic — at risk of waterborne infection — and organisationally chaotic. While supermarket looting by mostly unaccompanied migrant minors ran rife, many of the organisations that whipped the citizen-led response were labeled “far-right” on public TV for voicing the sense of neglect on the spot. Not all dispatches from the ground were accurate, but the authorities dismissed too many that were.

 What took politicians so long? Emergency powers had been long devolved to the regions in Spain’s quasi-federal compact, allowing Valencia to potentially flash alerts and run the whole response, at least in the beginning. But Mazón shirked, his relevant mandarin for that devolved area unfamiliar with the requisite technology. Pulled out of a luncheon with a journalist to whom he had offered a role on public TV, he rolled into his own emergency meeting two hours late. To be fair, he has not kept shirking since, instead attracting most of the flack that others should more readily share with him, and that Madrid’s left-wing coalition is eschewing most successfully. With the same intel at hand, Sánchez chose not to share — let alone fully wrestle — the powers over the reaction, even as declaring an emergency of his own from Madrid was always an easy call. In Paiporta, he was booed the loudest and fled in a car, blaming disinformation and the far right.

As soon as it dawned on all that neither would take the lead, the blame-shifting and buck-passing began, in turn delaying Europe’s aid to the response. Beneath a calculated veneer of on-camera niceties traded between Sánchez and Mazón, the polarised machinery of our “partitocracy” hummed. Its ghastlier exhibit came from Ribera herself, whose confirmation to the European Commission was in jeopardy precisely for her role as Sánchez’s climate czar. Ribera accused Mazón on air of going fully MIA, his phone unresponsive, a plausibly exaggerated claim that Mazón has denied with screenshots posted of Ribera’s only text to him that day. Their petty twitter war plunged the whole affair into unsuspected depths of puerility.

And while Europe likes to claim the mantle of supranational aligner of collective action, it may go absent, too, when national leaders are too busy squabbling. It took a few more days for the European Solidarity Fund (ESF) and the EU’s Civil Protection Mechanism to be activated, and a proposal to repurpose post-Covid NextGen funds to be bandied about, even as the bloc’s satellite imagery agency, Copernicus — also a late arriver to rescue operations — happens to be based near Madrid.

 As for the partisan finger-pointing in Spain, it largely occurs within an elite liable to blame climate change for a broad swathe of differing phenomena. You can sense the antics meant to leave green policies, the most probable cause for the country’s lack of preparedness, off the chopping block of accountability. Focusing on the petty politics of the day-after leaves unaddressed, indeed, the inadequate paradigm of flood prevention policy that put the country at risk in the first place, around which the ranks of the ruling elite remain tight-closed. With two-way accusations serving instead as a subterfuge of mutual exculpation, polarisation remains theatrically residual. 

… part of our preparedness was forfeited under the very pretext of protecting us from natural disasters

It turns out that part of our preparedness was forfeited under the very pretext of protecting us from natural disasters. The EU’s biodiversity laws are part of the creed that buttresses these incoherences, including a hodgepodge on “nature restoration” passed this year that nudges governments to remove diversion dams or discard proposals to strengthen them, even as these plans are often put forth by engineer-packed hydrographic boards such as the one Ribera oversaw around the Júcar river. Green dogma posits that the roots, branches and sediments these dams retain hold up water’s free flow, while overlooking their role in limiting the flooding that results, paradoxically, from the very rainstorms that environmentalists assure will become likelier with time. This would seem a fairly dull, technical dilemma for experts to hash out under the overarching imperative of saving lives. But the consensus around the EU’s green agenda is not one that Spain’s two major parties seem willing to revisit — hence the deflective finger-pointing.

Ribera’s all-but-secured job is a testament to the resilience of this tacit accord. Upon claiming her Euro-MP seat atop their party’s list in June, Sánchez nominated her to serve on the next Commission. When Ursula emerged as the undisputed candidate to lead it, she outlined the roles of her commissioner-designates: with Teresa her deputy, Spain was to be influential in the EU’s executive arm as perhaps never before. Undoubtedly  an expert, Teresa is also the pawn of a deal struck by Ursula with Sánchez. The former needs the largest member state ruled by a left-wing executive to support her initiatives, while Ribera’s nomination is payback in kind: if confirmed, her immense portfolio as Executive VP would include some areas of competition policy that Thierry Breton handled the past five years. More than a purely green czar, she will grow to oversee the European Green Deal along with all aspects — purely economic, too — of the much-touted “transition”. Sánchez can also be assured to get away with breaching Spain’s rule-of-law scot-free until running for re-election in 2027.

Without the floods, Ribera would have cruised to confirmation frictionlessly. Yet when they struck, Spain’s right-of-center PP allegedly persuaded the pan-European EPP leader, Manfred Weber, to put the group’s support on hold before summoning her to a parliamentary hearing in Madrid, where it hoped to exact from Ribera a commitment to resign were she found to have been negligent or otherwise sharing responsibility for the floods. Weber looked willing to oppose his fellow German CDU politician’s plans, by frontally siding with PP against her and Ribera. If the Spanish hearing didn’t go as planned and the EP votes went missing, it could have derailed Ursula’s plan to beat Trump to the punch entirely — given how difficult it would be to find a suitable replacement.

Yet the PP folded overnight on Tuesday last week, even as its leader in Brussels had claimed she would never back Ribera. Having previously accused her of seeking the allegedly unsavoury backing of right-wing leaders Viktor Orbán and Giorgia Meloni — the S&D group was indeed willing to confirm the Hungarian and Italian commissioners, whom they previously labeled a “far-right” danger, in exchange having Ribera rubber-stamped — the PP has thrown its support around the socialist minister they had claimed to revile. On Wednesday, the Parliament approved the new college in an up-or-down, packaged vote. 

Beyond the move’s fallout in Spain, it is unclear what Ursula may have offered the PP — or threatened it with — in return. Precisely when the ever-strong uniparty seemed about to fray, it has come back in force without much apparent work. Perhaps its most dogmatic article of faith, that no catastrophe is to be blamed on green overreach, proves as resilient as ever as a result. No flood seems dramatic enough to shake it.