It was not an easy promise to keep, but Alberto Núñez Feijóo assured several times in the recent electoral campaign that one of the first initiatives that he intended to promote in the event of becoming Prime Minister was a great national water pact that he would resolve at once for all the water deficit suffered by certain Spanish basins.
The current president of the Generalitat Valenciana was counting on the fact that, while this complex pact was being negotiated, a new central government led by the PP would rectify the criteria of the Minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, inflexible when applying those established in the new basin plans. Any advance in this line that would please the Segura irrigators to some extent could be considered a success.
It is true that, politically, given that the management of hydrographic basins is a state responsibility, it costs less to raise the tone of protest against a government of a different sign – as Ximo Puig well knows, forced to carry out all kinds of balances to contradict the ministry without being disloyal to the government-; so that, if Sánchez ends up presiding over a new coalition, it is foreseeable that Mazón will raise his voice against the cut in the transfer even more, if possible, than he has been doing up to now.
And behind that banner, Vox, his government partner, will undoubtedly accompany him, which manages a Ministry of Agriculture predisposed – and this was established in the first draft of the government pact – not only to maintain, but to expand the irrigated area in the fields, against the criteria of ecologists and climate and environmental researchers, such as the 2022 national research award winner Fernando Maestre, an expert from Alicante on desertification, who is vehemently opposed to that idea.
If in the field of politics things have not happened as Carlos Mazón expected, neither are the winds blowing in his favor in the courts. Yesterday, the Supreme Court dismissed the precautionary suspension requested by the Provincial Council of Alicante and the Region of Murcia in the application of the Royal Decree, which implies an increase in ecological flows and, therefore, a reduction in the water to be transferred.
As soon as he heard the news, the president of the Generalitat Valenciana hastened to state that he is going to put the issue in the hands of the Generalitat’s lawyers to “study all the legal mechanisms, if there are any, to arm ourselves legally because politically it is “We are going to do it. But we are going to ask that this issue be studied and that it be coordinated with the rest of the administrations so that we all defend together the water that touches us and that we deserve.”
Mazón knows, because this is not the first or second time that the Supreme Court has ruled, that although the court has not judged the merits of the matter, that is, the legality of the revision of the basin plans, in its arguments the Supreme Court It tends to coincide with the State Advocacy in the line of considering the application of ecological flows an obligation derived from European legislation.
And it is significant that in the order released yesterday it is stated that “the non-implementation of the flow regime or the eventual suspension of its application until a certain moment would imply avoiding the achievement of adequate hydromorphological conditions for the surface water masses present in the Tagus axis and, consequently, jeopardize achieving good ecological status in them before the end of 2027, in accordance with the deadlines reflected in the Water Framework Directive”.
In fact, this new chapter of the long entanglement was interpreted yesterday by the Association of Riverside Municipalities of the Entrepeñas and Buendía Reservoirs as legal support for their theses, “a step forward” in the objective of “achieving ecological flows with all their components in all the water masses of the Tagus basin”.
Dresden Provincial Council, its new president, who is also president of the provincial PP, Toni Pérez, assured that he felt “deeply upset” by this order issued by the 3rd Chamber of the Supreme Administrative Litigation and advanced that the Legal Services of the institution will study the filing of an appeal for reversal even knowing that “it is difficult for it to succeed”.
It so happens that one of the authors of the reports provided by the Alicante Provincial Council in the appeal rejected by the Supreme Court is Joaquín Melgarejo, who has just been elected deputy for Alicante with the foreseeable mission of defending in Congress the need to a shift in national water policy.
In any case, it seems clear that the judicial battle has still to come, that the problem is far from being resolved, and that the political situation, with the current possibility of repeated elections in the Region of Murcia and even in the State, does not seem the most propitious for agreements to be reached is this transcendental issue.
If the forecasts of the climatologists come true, in the Palau, as in La Moncloa, they will have to turn on the high beams and see beyond the next five years in search of a realistic and sustainable solution to some water limitations that everything indicates that they are not going to go precisely less.
