King Felipe Urges Spain To Learn Lessons From Flood Response

King Felipe VI has used his traditional Christmas Eve broadcast to the Spanish people for the country to draw lessons from this year’s catastrophic floods to “strengthen society and make us grow.”

The DANA that hit the Valencian region on 29th October was the biggest peacetime disaster in modern Spanish history and  left 231 people dead and devastated swathes of the region.

Some 800,000 people were affected by the storm and thousands of victims still remain homeless and are spending Christmas without loved ones, homes or property.

The floods left residents reeling in fury at the seeming incompetence that led to the disaster.

Felipe and Queen Letizia felt that fury when they made a visit to the ground-zero town of Paiporta, where survivors pelted them and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez with mud in images that shocked Spain.

“We have realised — and understood — the frustration, the pain, the impatience, the demands for a greater and more efficient coordination by the administrations,” Felipe said in a subtle reference to the unrest.

The tragedy was “an event difficult to accept, but from which we must all be able to draw the necessary lessons that strengthen us as a society and make us grow,” Felipe said from his official residence in El Pardo.

However the king highlighted that despite the tragedy Spaniards should be proud of the response of the emergency services as well as the example set by those who opened their homes to shelter the most vulnerable and the tens of thousands of volunteers who came from all over the country to help in the aftermath.

This is, the King summed up, “solidarity in its purest form”, a formula that can be extrapolated to many other aspects of public and private life, he added.

“Over and above any possible differences and disagreements, there is a clear idea in Spanish society of what is best, of what benefits everyone and that, for this reason, we have the interest and responsibility to protect and reinforce it,” said Felipe VI, before pointing out that both he and Queen Letizia have been able to confirm and value the rule of law throughout this decade of reign.

The 56-year-old monarch used his eleventh Christmas speech to plead for restraint in politics amid a climate of polarisation exacerbated by the floods.

“It is necessary that the political battle, legitimate but occasionally deafening, does not prevent us from hearing an even more clamorous demand: a demand for calm,” he said.

Felipe also referred to the divisive topic of immigration as irregular arrivals to the Canary Islands broke records for a second year running, straining authorities on the Atlantic archipelago.

Migration was a “daily reality” that could “lead — without the right management — to tensions that erode social cohesion”, he added.

The message concluded with the traditional Christmas greeting delivered in Spain´s four official languages; Castilian, Catalan, Galician and Basque.

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