Dear Ursula

Representatives of victims of the floods that devastated parts of Valencia last October travelled to Brussels this week for a meeting with EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. For reasons unknown, their request to meet the EU leader when she was in Valencia for a European People's Party Congress at the end of April was denied. Instead, the delegates had to wait two more weeks - and pay their own fares to the Belgian capital - to present an explosive three-page letter to Von der Leyen.

"We write from a place of deep pain," the letter begins: "[As] victims, as grieving families, but above all, as European citizens." The representatives go on to express their anger at not being warned about heavy rainfall (even though the meteorological information was available in advance) and at being "completely abandoned" by the Spanish authorities during and immediately after the disaster, while recovery efforts were coordinated by volunteers.

The victims' anger is focused on Valencia's PP president Carlos Mazón', who was reportedly at a long lunch with a journalist as the waters rose on 29 October. The letter points out that crisis-management in Spain is the responsibility of regional governments and urges Von der Leyen to issue a "clear and public condemnation, as leader of the European People's Party, of the negligent and denialist actions of Mr Mazón".

Mazón must of course shoulder some of the blame for the scale of the disaster. But he was not the only one at fault, nor were the floods directly attributable to what the letter's signatories call "climate denialism". Pedro Sánchez is not mentioned once, despite the fact that his Socialist-led government took more than three days to respond. At the time, Sánchez claimed that "substituting [the national government] for the regional administration would reduce efficiency". In less tragic circumstances, that could have been taken as a sick joke. There was very little regional efficiency to substitute.

The consequences of climate activism are also omitted from the letter. A project to re-channel the Poyo ravine, which caused some of the worst flooding in Valencia, was shelved in 2021, partly because of concerns about its environmental impact. That decision was made by Teresa Ribera, at the time the Socialist-led government's environment minister. Arguably, the environmentalist policies traditionally pursued by the European left are incompatible with the interventionist projects required to contain extreme weather.

In a phrase apparently inspired by George Orwell's 1984, the delegates informed Von der Leyen that "the European Commission must watch over all citizens, regardless of where they live or which party governs them". Ursula's new role, should she choose to accept it, is much more elevated (and complex) than her current post: it is nothing less than Goddess-elect, charged with preventing natural disasters and keeping her own party out of regional administrations.