When water mixes with dirt it becomes mud, tons of mud, the kind of mud that, in the wake of flash floods on Oct. 29 and 30, has turned the Spanish region of València into a kind of war zone. More than 200 people are dead; nearly 90 are still missing; hundreds of houses, roads and railways are destroyed; and towns are cut off without electricity, water, or provisions. Hundreds of families have lost everything. Large swaths of the region have been transformed into a brown hell, reeking of decay, after rivers topped their banks, sending water coursing through towns and cities.

But there is more than one kind of mud.

When administrative incompetence mixes with political partisanship, as has happened here, then another kind of mud emerges: populism. In this catastrophe, those anti-government forces that have been swirling in the dark edges of Spanish politics for years are now feeding on the many levels of incompetence of the state, and the absence of an effective public response by regional or national authorities.

Right now both València and Spain, mired in this morass, are at risk of being engulfed by the zeitgeist undermining so many Western democracies — and summarized in the slogan that quickly emerged on Spanish social media after the floods: “Only the people save the people.” It is the old trick of populism: confronting established institutions with the philosophical falsehood of the peoples’s purity; the idea that the average citizen is more capable at solving the problems of society than the government is.

I was born here. I grew up here. I belong to a people — the Valèncian people — with an almost pathological obsession with water due to our history of severe droughts and torrential autumn rains. Water turned us into one of the main agricultural regions of the Mediterranean and enriched us with the export of our oranges, one of the largest sources of foreign currency in Spain during the years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. We had little industry but we had water, and that allowed us to survive. However, in this century, with the acceleration of climate change, we are increasingly vulnerable to flooding and brutal weather events, such as the recent torrential rains that have caused the destruction of the area around València, a destruction that now threatens to also be political.

After the initial shock of the extent of the damage, a variety of feelings emerged. First, the bewilderment of the citizens confronted by deadly error: The local authorities failed to warn the population in time of the real danger that water would fill the streets, putting lives at risk. “Avoidable deaths,” read the cover of Libération. It comes with an almost unbearable burden of guilt — so many lives lost.

Next came solidarity, with thousands of young people — already labeled the Shovel and Broom Generation — helping the devastated places that the state and the regional governments did not reach in the initial days of the catastrophe. They came from towns across the region to remove mud, clean houses, tow away cars and distribute food. In these times of individualism, the image of the spontaneous wave of young volunteers sullied with mud provided a rush of pride for a wounded people making the tragedy more manageable.

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