The PP of Galicia has something of a “paper tiger”. Proof of this is that the main Galician cities are governed by the left. And the overwhelming absolute majorities of the popular ones are sometimes held on with pins. In fact, Núñez Feijóo's last victory, in 2020, was also oversized. Of the 42 seats he won (four above the absolute majority in a Chamber of 75 deputies), at least three were decided by a narrow margin of votes.
For example, in Pontevedra there were 96 ballots and in Lugo, 1,291. But in A Coruña there would have even been almost 5,000 votes left over for Podemos to snatch the last deputy from the PP, if it were not for the reform that Manuel Fraga imposed in 1992 and which raised the threshold of votes necessary to access Parliament from 3% to 5 % (and in 2020, the purple ones were less than six tenths away from that cut-off score). Even the PSOE could have taken that last seat from the PP if it had added 4,300 more votes in A Coruña (on account of the 100,000 ballots it lost compared to the 2019 general elections).
In general, even counting all the votes of each block, the advantage of conservatism in Galicia in absolute votes over the last decade does not usually go beyond 40,000 ballots in the regional elections (out of a participation that is around one million and a half of voters, and on a census of 2,700,000 voters). But this moderate differential in votes compared to the left-wing opposition translates into very large advantages in seats for the PP: between seven and nine more deputies since 2012.
The explanation is simple: an electoral system biased to the benefit of the right, since where the 5% threshold does not reach, the design of the constituencies does. As happens in other places, the least populated provinces with the highest percentage of conservative votes are overrepresented. Each seat in A Coruña or Pontevedra represents more than 40,000 voters, but in Lugo and Ourense that ratio drops to 25,000.
The result of this distortion is that even if the left and the Galician nationalists add more votes than the PP (or the conservative bloc as a whole), the popular ones always have an absolute majority within reach. It happened in 2009 – when PSdG and Bloc were evicted from the Galician Government – although the left added more votes. And it also happened twenty years earlier, in 1989, when Fraga recovered the Xunta for the PP. On that occasion, the left and the Galicians added three and a half points more than the Popular Party and the CDS (and almost 40,000 votes ahead). And even so, the popular party won half plus one of the seats in the House.
The Galician left has only been able to win an absolute (and scrappy) majority in the 2005 elections, when the Socialists and Bloc obtained almost seven points more than the PP and an absolute vote advantage of 111,000 votes (but only one more deputy). The province that could best explain the secret of these distortions is Ourense, the most Trumpist of the Galician constituencies.
It could be said that it all began there, in 1989, when the conjunction of the electoral system with the dispersion of the left and Galicianism gave Fraga the decisive seat to govern the Xunta. With the results of A Coruña, Lugo and Pontevedra, the Popular Party and the Galician left were tied at 30 seats. Certainly, if the more than 72,000 votes that Galicianism gathered in Pontevedra had come in one, two or even three brands, instead of four (and wasting more than 17,000 ballots that did not achieve representation), it would have obtained one more seat at the expense of the PP. And in that case, the result of Ourense would have been irrelevant.
However, in the Orense constituency, a margin of 110 ballots in the case of the BNG, and 464, in that of the socialists, allowed Fraga to claim the absolute majority by taking seat number eight and totaling 38 of the majority. of the camera. In Ourense, the dispersion of Galician nationalism left almost 20,000 voters without representation, while the radical left spoiled 2,300 more ballots.
More than three decades later, the lesson should be clear for the left and Galician nationalists if they aspire to defeat the PP in such an adverse scenario. On 23-J they added 31,000 more votes than the conservative bloc, but they obtained three fewer seats.
