Alex Trelinski
VALENCIA president Carlos Mazon says his region won’t accept any further illegal migrants in temporary reception centres paid for by the national government.
Monday’s announcement coincided with his Partido Popular administration sealing a deal with the far-right Vox party to get its 2025 budget through the Valencian parliament.
That comes as the embattled regional leader is fighting off massive criticism of the way he handled October’s flood disaster.
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Carlos Mazon said: “The Valencian Community has exceeded the limit of its capacity and will not admit any more distribution of illegal immigrants promoted by the Pedro Sanchez government.”
He added that like other regions, ‘Valencia has a problem with illegal migration and with mafias that take advantage of the problem to do business while generating social unrest’.
The Valencian leader commented that he ‘agreed’ with Vox in rejecting the national government’s migration policy.
“Our centres are saturated and it is clear that mass illegal immigration needs to be tackled with a new migration policy at national and European level,” he demanded.
“We urgently need to speed up the expulsions of illegal immigrants,” he added,
Mazon’s move is a break with the Partido Popular nationally as it does cooperate with the socialist-led government as to where migrants arriving in the Canary Islands can be housed on the mainland.
Ironically, this was a big sticking point for Vox national leader Santiago Abascal last summer when he decided to order the party to drop out of regional government coalitions.
The parliamentary spokesperson for the left-wing Valencian Compromis party, Joan Baldovi, described Mazon as a ‘political corpse’ and attacked him for ‘grovelling to the extreme right’ to get his budget passed.
Baldovi said his comments were ‘indescribable’ and that he was ‘ashamed’ to hear them.
He also cast Vox’s stance as that of a ‘traitorous’ party that was giving ‘oxygen’ to Mazon and ‘betraying the interests of Valencians’ purely for electoral advantage.
