For the seventh time in its twelve elections, Galicia has been forced to wait until the count of the external vote, which takes place this Monday, to know the final composition of its parliament, pending a seat in Ourense, which the PSOE aspires to take from the PP. This enormous imprint of suffrage from abroad is, apparently, most natural, since the history of Galicia is written on cardboard suitcases, especially those on ships heading to America. However, the migratory past constitutes only the raw material on which a series of political decisions have been made since the Transition, with more than singular consequences.
Although it would have no impact on the outcome of 18-F, that of the clear absolute majority obtained by the current president of the Xunta, the popular Alfonso Rueda, the PSOE appears in theoretical conditions to take over what would be its second deputy for Ourense , of which he was 112 votes away on election night. However, the PP is confident that if the socialists achieve their objective, it will be at the expense of the BNG, traditionally very weak abroad, which has already cost them two deputies in the past. But the nationalist party led by Ana Pontón has more margin, because while the popular ones obtained the last of the fourteen deputies at stake in Ourense on election night, the nationalists took the penultimate one.
Furthermore, in 2020 the BNG achieved a historic second place in the whole of outer Galicia, although the value of that precedent remains to be seen, since the participation was minimal, with just over 5,000 votes, half that of four years before and compared to to the almost 30,000 that have arrived this time, a figure still much lower than that between 1997 and 2009. In any case, the distance in ballots between the three main parties in the fight for the last two deputies is very small, which announces an initially close recount. Remaining on the sidelines is Democracia Ourensana, the party of the capital's bizarre mayor, Gonzalo Pérez Jácome, who made a splash by getting a deputy, who is more than arithmetically consolidated.
Until now, four changes of hands of a deputy have been registered in Galicia due to the effect of the external vote, those in 1989, 1997, 2009 and 2020. In 1985 the expectation that the distribution of deputies on election night would be altered in Pontevedra was finally in nothing, just as happened in 2005 in the same province, in that case after the agony of leaving eight days in the air for the ultimately confirmed fall of Manuel Fraga from the presidency of the Xunta, in the middle of the era, , of the “stolen vote.”
Although Galicians make up only 5.6% of the Spanish population, they constitute the first group abroad. But the enormous weight of the diaspora in the electoral roll of Galicia, 17.7%, is not as natural as it may seem at first glance, but rather the product of an entire political engineering, combined, of course, with more than a century of intense exodus abroad, to which was added the outbreak generated by the great economic crisis of three decades ago.
Although it is often established even by professors of Constitutional Law, such as the authors of a book full of gross errors published by the Center for Political and Constitutional Studies in 2022, there is no linear relationship between the existence of a strong migratory flow abroad , past or present, and the size of the electoral roll abroad. It looks great when looking at some of the world's largest diasporas.
For example, while in Italy and Portugal electoral generosity with expatriates prevails, in line with Spain, through the automatic inclusion in the census of all those registered in the consulates, in Ireland, with its colossal diaspora, there is no vote abroad. And in India, Mexico and Greece there are so many legal restrictions that it is negligible.
Spain also presents the great peculiarity of a mutating legislation, with which in 48 years it has not stopped turning on and off the tap of the electoral reserve that was created abroad from the forgotten key moment of November 1976. Then the Government of Adolfo Suárez implemented external voting, to take advantage of the foreseeable massive affirmative vote of Spaniards from the rest of Europe in the referendum on the Law for Political Reform. However, since these emigrants were “red”, the Suarista government made an immediate change to guarantee that they could barely vote in the 1977 general elections.
Now the floodgates of the diaspora's electoral reserve are once again wide open. However, the slight increase in participation in the last general elections, after the removal of the obstacles of the "requested vote", confirmed that the data that were taken as a reference, those from just before the 2011 reform, that is, those from the 2008 general elections, were adulterated by the “stolen vote.” There were never almost 400,000 voters abroad, as the flawed official figures claim. Almost 400,000 ballots arrived from outside the borders, which means something very different, with large-scale fraud. In July, with a much larger census than in 2008, but with more democratic guarantees and without political parties in the role of unscrupulous conquerors in pursuit of American electoral gold, there were just over 200,000 votes.
This uncontrolled census of foreigners, by the successive batches of nationalized Latin Americans, converted into voters without having to request it as happens in most of the world, has intersected with the fragmentation of Spanish politics, which frequently means that some seats are awarded for a handful of ballots. In this way the influence of the diaspora has skyrocketed.
For the seat in Ourense to win, in principle the PSOE needs the PP to stop quadrupling it by adding the votes from abroad to those counted on February 18, since what would be its second deputy is at stake, at the expense of the eighth of the popular ones. . If it happens, after those of 1989 and 2009, it would be the third time it has happened in a regional election in this constituency, the one with the greatest weight of foreign suffrage in the entire State.
It would represent, above all, the fifth change of a deputy in just five years in Spain, after those of the general elections of 2019 and 2023 and those of the Basque and Galician elections of 2020, all in favor of the PP, so that if it were to lose Today there would be a considerable surprise. As there is only eleven changes recorded in the previous 34 years, since foreign votes began to be counted separately in 1985, since 2019 there has been a more than appreciable increase in the political influence of the diaspora, the intensity of which is put to the test today in Ourense. The electoral gold of America emerges once again, a continent that contributes more than half of the Galician foreign vote.
