The suppression of the requested vote has not translated into a significant reduction in the enormous abstention rate in the Spanish diaspora, according to the first data handled by the parties and those that have emerged from several of the largest Spanish consulates in America. Of just over a million voters from the 12 communities with regional elections, not even 10% would have participated, but rather a little more than 5% or 6%. Compared to the 3.4% that occurred in these dozen territories in 2019, this would be a considerable increase, but abstention would continue at scandalous levels, without reaching the objective of the legislative reform last September to recover higher levels of participation. reasonable. The general elections on July 23 will constitute a great test to see if there is a progressive increase or if, in addition to problems in the legislation, there is an overestimation of the desire to vote from abroad, as has happened in many countries.
This morning the first official data on participation without a requested vote should appear, since the counting will be carried out in several communities, as is the case of the one with the largest census, Madrid, with 372,218 voters abroad, which represent more than 7%. of the total. Yesterday the figure of just over 19,000 envelopes from abroad was handled, which would yield a participation of 5%, although it would rise if last-minute shipments appeared. In any case, this rate could also be lower if there were irregularities in any envelope in relation to the shipping rules, which would prevent it from entering the polls and would not be null.
While in the Canary Islands the recount will still take place on Monday, because in its day the archipelago followed in the footsteps of Galicia de Fraga Iribarne to give eight days margin to allow as many ballots to arrive as possible, Friday will be the turn of autonomy in which there are some prospects, in principle very remote, that a decisive seat for governability could change hands, Asturias. It is the only community in which this fact has occurred in the past, in 2012, in favor of the socialists, traditional dominators in the Asturian diaspora.
This previous trajectory constitutes one of the factors that makes it very unlikely that the PP will manage to take 935 votes from the Socialists in the Eastern constituency, one of the three into which the Principality is divided, to snatch a seat from them. That deputy, if he forged an agreement between the three rights, PP, Vox and the regionalists of Foro, the ex-party of Francisco Álvarez Cascos, would lead the popular Diego Canga to the presidency, to the detriment of the socialist Adrián Barbón. The popular Asturians have clung these days to the expatriate status of Canga himself, a Eurobureaucrat who voted in Brussels, to point out that he can reach a new profile of the electorate, in addition to having traveled to America.
The Asturian east seems very complicated, although it is less than a change, in favor of the PP in Ciudad Real, the other province that was in the spotlight for the foreign count. The president of the Popular Party himself, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, very struggling in Galicia in foreign scrutinies, has expressed that some possibility exists, without it being exactly easy.
If there is no great surprise, the interest of the ballots in the twelve autonomies of 28-M resides, once again, in participation. According to data handled by the parties on Monday of the countries with the highest census, which represent more than 85% of the total, there would be around 52,000 voters, with a participation of 5.6%. Extrapolated to the census as a whole, the number of voters becomes about 60,000, which would coincide with the number of applications registered in 2019, when Spaniards abroad had to ask the Electoral Census Office for documentation to vote, in a few more terms. That adjusted, especially for the American countries.
Since the requested vote was released in 2011, also in regional elections like the ones this Sunday, the participation rate fell from just over 20% in 2007 to between 3% in 2015 and 3.6% in 2011 , with 3.4% in 2019. Although parties such as Podemos and also the PSOE, as well as citizen movements such as the Marea Garnet, took the figures prior to the reform as a reference, such as 31.7% of the general figures of 2008 , were highly inflated percentages due to the practices of massive fraud by parties and governments, central and regional and even host countries. In the 2009 Galicians, for the first time, it was required to attach a photocopy of the DNI, or equivalent document, and participation fell by ten points. This requirement is now once again the best guarantee against fraud.
As reported by España Exterior, a newspaper specializing in information for the diaspora, in the largest Spanish consulate, in Buenos Aires, the participation of 28-M was 6.7% of the census, with 4,866 envelopes, 3,680 of them sent by mail. and 1,186 deposited in the ballot box. In neighboring Montevideo the percentage was higher, 8%, while in Caracas it was 6.5%. In this case, the increase is significant because with the requested vote and the functioning of the Venezuelan post office, hardly any votes arrived, which was dramatic in the case of the Canary Islands.
As of today, the official participation figures by communities will be known, which will foreseeably be higher in the Mediterranean, with the highest census in Europe, where there has been more movement, in countries such as Switzerland or Germany. In any case, an abstention rate of more than 90% is scandalous and anomalous. It also has to do with the forgotten reform of 1995, when Spain became one of the few countries in the world that included all those citizens registered in a consulate in the electoral roll. There were more states that recently implemented this modality, such as Argentina or Portugal, but it is still a very minority.
