17.7% of the 2,693,624 Galicians with the right to vote in Sunday's elections, almost half a million, reside abroad. They are spread across half the world. They are the children of the diaspora. Yesterday the deadline for them to cast their vote at consular centers expired, but their participation rate is not yet known. The official count will not be known until Monday, February 23.
The Galicians were, along with the Catalans and, to a lesser extent, the Andalusians of the coastal provinces, the first to discover that there were other places where they could live better than in their villages.
This phenomenon began at the end of the 19th century and, unlike what would happen in Catalonia, it still persists in Galicia, although to a lesser extent. Even today, in this 2024 electoral campaign, the Galician parties reproach themselves for the loss of population. About 100,000 people in the last 15 years. In Galicia there is hardly any immigration.
To get an idea of the importance of this community spread around the world, just look at the numbers. 166,000 Galician citizens live in Argentina. In Cuba, 45,000, a figure identical to that of Brazil. In Europe, the country with the most Galicians is Switzerland, basically in the canton of Geneva, where 34,000 live.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to know in advance what impact the participation of this population with the right to vote will have. In the general elections of July 23, 30,000 voters participated out of the half million who could do so. Possibly, in these autonomous regions the figure will be lower, but it is difficult to predict because, in addition, these will be the first elections in which the requested vote will not be applied, which made participation extremely difficult.
The one who was until a year ago president of the Federation of Galician Associations of the Argentine Republic, Diego Martínez Duro, estimates, based on the votes that had been received until Tuesday at the consulate of Buenos Aires, that the participation could double in comparison with the votes in which the requested vote was applied. In 2020, in the last elections, this system was still in force.
Martínez maintains that the Argentine political scene, with the recent victory of Javier Milei, is unlikely to be transferred to the Galician elections. “The vote for Milei was a vote of anger, in which the political position of left or right had little to do with it.”
The truth is that, if the hypothesis on which all the polls agree is true and these elections end up being decided by a handful of votes, what the voters in the external census have said may be important. In fact, in the electoral history of Galicia, these votes have served to change in one direction or another the result known on election night. It already happened in 1989, when a deputy from Ourense from the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG) ended up in the hands of the PSOE. In 1997 the situation was repeated again in this case with another BNG deputy for A Coruña who ended up being from the PP. In 2009 it happened again, but in this case, between a deputy from the PSOE and the PP, and in 2020 the same thing happened in reverse.
What these data tell us is that, in general, the vote from abroad is a weapon that is in the hands of the PP and, to a lesser extent, the PSOE. A force with autonomous implementation like the BNG almost always has the upper hand among these voters, and this is relevant in these elections given that it is the Bloc and not the PSOE that disputes the highest provincial percentages to Alfonso Rueda's PP.
However, in the 2020 elections the BNG was already the second electoral force in the foreign vote with 19% of the votes, one point above the PSOE, but well below the PP, which obtained more than 40%. This indicates that in reality there is a certain correlation between what is voted inside, in Galicia, and what is voted outside.
Having the external apparatus is an unmatched advantage for the Government party. In recent months, Alfonso Rueda has traveled as president to visit the federations of emigrants, and the Xunta provides substantial aid to these organizations. The Galician Government also has personal help programs, grants study scholarships and even has a program to help returnees. For its part, the PSOE has sent advertising to Galician voters in Argentina promising “a social bonus.”
One of Alfonso Rueda's first acts in this campaign, held in Vigo, consisted precisely of bringing together expatriates who had recently returned to Galicia. Curiously, one of the people who participated in this event was a Venezuelan, the granddaughter of emigrants who had never been to Galicia. This young woman's case is not exceptional. According to some estimates, 60% of this half a million potential voters from abroad were not born in Galicia, and the vast majority do not know this country. But they have the right to vote.
