This Saturday’s demonstration was a great success. The left has been able to react and to lead the wave of indignation against the Carlos Mazón and the PP. Genova is trying to apportion blame for the disastrous reaction of the central government, but if anything is evident it is that the left knows how to mobilize its own and the right is almost always left out of the game.
This does not mean that the demonstrators gathered in the Town Hall Square and in front of the Generalitat were all sympathizers of the organizing entities. That would be absurd. If the PP tries to sell that message it would fall into the same discourse of Pedro Sánchez and the PSOE when they said that the indignados of Paiporta were “ultra-right”.
What the Popular Party can exploit is the manifesto that was read in front of the Palau de la Generalitat. Identifying Mazón and the PP with the interests of businessmen and capital (against the “workers of the people”) and with the climate change deniers. is, to say the least, to overdo the brakes.. Yesterday it was time for unity and the manifesto, very lukewarm in denouncing the incompetence of the national government, was disjunctive.
The “Valencian autumn” that began yesterday may provoke a different reaction. If the alternative to the disastrous performance of the Consell are the radical messages, maybe they cause an opposite effect to the desired one. The left is relying on what the historian Raymond Carr wrote, that the Spanish right wing when it lacks leadership and sees that the street mobilizes it locks itself in its house waiting for everything to calm down.
With everything, the Valencian left needed to regain the initiative to stand up to the Consell and its bases have undoubtedly moved successfully.. They will make the foreseeable resignation of Mazón their own and will subsequently ask for an early election to prevent time from reducing the mobilization that they have achieved with remarkable success.