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The definitive approval in the Senate of the elimination of the requested vote on September 21, eleven years after its implementation, reopens an important niche of voters at the gates of a new electoral cycle. With the pre-campaign already activated, PSOE and PP are launching themselves for the 2.27 million Spaniards who are residing abroad and who in the next regional and state elections will hardly have obstacles to exercise their right to vote. Although scattered around the world, they add up to more inhabitants than some autonomous communities have and, in a landscape as fragmented as the current one, each ballot counts to decide majorities.
Both parties are almost the only ones that can fight for the vote of residents abroad, since they have an important foreign network, inherited from the years prior to the reform that introduced the requested vote, and which they had allowed to languish in recent years. , precisely because of the decrease in the incidence of exiled voters when including the obstacles of the requested vote. In the 2008 general elections, the last without this system, 31.88% of expatriates voted. In the following calls to the Cortes Generales (2011-2019), participation plummeted and ranged between 4.73% and 6.8%. Now, they are working to reactivate their nodes in the colonies of Spanish citizens.
In the PSOE they have been preparing for a long time a reinforcement of the party outside the borders of Spain, although the pandemic delayed the plans somewhat. “Some groups were a bit forgotten. We are working on updating the network abroad: changing teams, strengthening groups…”, says the secretary of the PSOE Exterior, Pilar Cancela.
In total, the Socialists have 17 groups abroad and 2,630 militants, which are more than the members of some federations such as La Rioja. Sánchez’s party has significant representation in Latin America (Buenos Aires, Caracas, Chile, Uruguay, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Colombia, as well as ties in Cuba, where the law does not allow such a structure) and Europe (Paris, Brussels or London) and intends to recover its presence in Switzerland and Germany.
“Before the requested vote we had a lot of power abroad. We were the first force. The requested vote did us a lot of damage politically. Citizens, seeing their right diminished, punished the ruling party, although the PSOE and PP agreed on the reform. There was a downturn in political activity abroad and new parties appeared that captured votes from the left. With the return to government, the reform of the vote and the memory law that recognizes the nationality of the grandchildren of those exiled from the war, we can resume with more force. It makes us recover the punch”, Cancela explains about the strategy that Ferraz will carry out outside of Spain to capture votes.
In addition to the visit of members of the Executive and a team in charge of that campaign in Ferraz, Cancela assumes that Pedro Sánchez will be employed in the first person and that he will visit affiliates abroad when he travels abroad. The leader of the PSOE intends to preside over the Socialist International from the month of November, which can become an important showcase that will be added to the rotating presidency of the EU in the last semester of 2023.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo also intends to roll up his sleeves abroad, despite the fact that the impact that the new system will have on the results is not clear. For now, he is planning a tour of Latin America for this fall in which he will be able to campaign both for the regional elections in May and for his own appointment with the polls at the end of 2023.
The opposition leader does not want any surprises. That is why he has chosen someone of his highest confidence for the Secretariat of the PP Abroad: the one who was his General Secretary of Emigration of the Xunta since 2012, still in office, Antonio Rodríguez Miranda. He was also the coordinator of Foreign Action of the Galician PP from 2013 until he followed his boss to Madrid.
That is to say, Feijóo placed the control of the Galicians residing abroad both in his Government and in his party to the same person. Rodríguez Miranda will continue to perform a double function: for the Galician president, Alfonso Rueda, with a public salary and, in principle, an institutional vision, and for his boss in Genoa and the one who gave him his great political opportunity more than a decade ago.
The leader reconciles both foreign agendas and is already preparing Rueda’s first tour of Argentina and Uruguay for this month of October. Then it will be Feijóo’s turn.
To complete the picture, Rodríguez Miranda has another old acquaintance of Feijóo above him: who was his general secretary in the Galician PP and today deputy secretary of Territorial Organization, Miguel Tellado. Two people of the highest confidence in him to prepare the landing of the leader in the reopened foreign vote market.
elDiario.es has tried, without success, to obtain Rodríguez Miranda’s opinion on his role in recovering participation in the elections and how he balances his public responsibilities (for which he receives 61,493.74 euros per year) and that of the party. In his social networks he has welcomed the reform, approved unanimously. “There are few satisfactions as great as recovering the real exercise of a right. As of today (yesterday) all Galicians abroad once again have the opportunity to exercise the right to vote with an agile, safe and transparent system”, He wrote on his Facebook account.
According to its website, the PP has “more than 13,000” affiliates abroad “mainly in Europe and America”, although the data may not be up to date since Ramón Moreno Bustos, who was relieved in 2018, is listed as head of the Secretariat. by Ana Vazquez
The PP has not wanted to respond to this medium about its organic policy outside of Spain. According to the same website, the party has offices in 11 European countries; 14 from South America, as well as in Mexico, the US and Canada; one in the Middle East (Israel); and one more in Australia.
The foreign vote has always been key for the PP. Especially for the PP of Galicia, since Manuel Fraga made it one of the mainstays of his chances of governing. Up to 15% of the Galician electoral census came to be made up of residents in other countries, especially in Latin America. A very juicy loot that everyone fought for. “They paid you 50 dollars to go and vote and we all voted for Fraga,” the musician Juan Carlos Cambas said two years ago on Radio Galega. On other occasions, it was high-ranking PSOE officials who handed out food vouchers to those attending the rallies.
“It is not the first time that the foreign vote decides majorities”, recalls Jacobo Blanco, dean of the College of Sociologists and Political Scientists of Asturias. In 2005, Fraga was one seat away from the absolute majority and the counting of the foreign vote kept the tension going for several days, although in the end it did not change things and PSOE and BNG snatched power from him. In 2012, Javier Fernández got one more deputy thanks to the foreign vote that, with the support of IU and UPyD, made him president of the Principality, taking power from Francisco Álvarez-Cascos.
But if anyone has fought against the request to vote, it has been Marea Granate, an organization whose origins lie in Youth Without a Future and in the mobilizations under the slogan “We are not leaving, they are throwing us out” that filled the streets and squares in the worst years. of the financial crisis and that converged, like others, in the 15M.
Although she celebrates the victory of generally eliminating the requested vote, María Almena, one of the platform’s spokespersons, regrets that “many people will still be excluded”. “The census is underrepresented because you have to register at the consulate and sometimes it is 500 kilometers away. That was one of the measures that we wanted, but it has not been changed, ”she explains in a telephone conversation with elDiario.es from Paris. She also reminds that temporary residents will not be part of that census.
His biggest concern is that the information does not reach all the exiles, who have to register at the consulates before December 31 to participate in the May elections, and for this reason Marea Granate intends to promote campaigns. Sources from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs assure that they are already preparing the official ones. Almena is aware that the parties will begin to give importance to rallies abroad, although she warns that participation has always been lower abroad than in Spain, even before the reform of the requested vote.
Like any electoral estimate, experts agree that it is complicated, although there are data that can give some signs. Jacobo Blanco divides voters abroad into two large blocks: the “young professionals” who have left in search of opportunities in the last years of the crisis and the old emigration who are exiles from the Republic and their descendants.
“Young professionals are supporters of the new parties. It is a moderate right-wing or left-wing profile that is not the PSOE –Yolanda Díaz, United We Can, Íñigo Errejón…–. With system mutations, we can get a surprise. With Citizens gone, no idea where that vote can go. I haven’t just seen people go out and vote for Vox”, summarizes Blanco, dean of the College of Sociologists and Political Scientists of Asturias.
United We Can, and the political space articulated around it, has been perhaps the actor that most strongly demanded to end the requested vote, “more for a question of justice than partisan rather than partisan,” indicate sources from the organization. “Thousands of fellow citizens today are equal in their right to vote. The young vote, in particular, will be able to exercise their right,” the same sources point out, reports José Enrique Monrosi. This fact contrasts with the almost null international presence of the parties that make up the coalition. Neither Podemos, nor IU, nor of course the very incipient Sumar platform, have almost no representation or capacity to mobilize votes, beyond the messages that arrive from Spain.
Blanco points out that traditional emigration, focused on countries in Mexico, Venezuela or Cuba, “usually vote for the PSOE.” In the Executive, they trust that policies such as the escaped talent recovery plan or the memory law, which recognizes the nationality of the grandchildren of exiles, will give them revenue.
The Carlos III University professor Lluís Orriols also sees difficulties in estimating what could happen, but explains that there are “patterns” of electoral behavior. “In aggregate terms, they vote more to the left, but there is a certain tendency to be a ruling party vote, a winning horse phenomenon,” says the political scientist. With the polls in a technical tie, Sánchez and Feijóo launch themselves for the vote abroad.
