The Galician PP is to some extent a "paper tiger". Proof of this is the fact that the main Galician cities are governed by the left. And the absolute overwhelming majorities of the popular are sometimes held together with tweezers. In fact, Núñez Feijóo's last victory was oversized. Of the 42 seats it won (four more than 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. In the case of A Coruña, however, Podemos would have had about 5,000 votes left over to wrest the last deputy from the PP, had it not been for the reform that Manuel Fraga imposed in 1992, which raised the threshold of votes needed to gain access in Parliament from 3% to 5% (and in 2020, the purples were less than six-tenths of this limit). Even the PSOE could have won that last seat from the PP if it had added 4,300 more votes in A Coruña (due to the 100,000 ballots it lost compared to the previous generals).
In general, even counting all the votes of each bloc, the advantage of conservatism in Galicia in absolute votes throughout the last decade does not usually go beyond 40,000 ballots in the autonomous regions (on a participation that is around one and a half million voters, and on a census of 2,700,000 voters). But this moderate differential in votes over the opposition translates into very wide advantages in seats for the PP: between seven and nine more MPs since 2012.
The explanation is simple: an electoral system biased in favor of the right, since where the 5% threshold is not reached, the design of the constituencies does. As is the case elsewhere, the least populated provinces with a higher percentage of the Conservative vote are overrepresented. Each seat in A Coruña or Pontevedra represents more than 40,000 voters, but in Lugo and Ourense this ratio drops to 25,000.
The result of this distortion is that, even if the left and Galicianism add up to more votes than the PP (or the conservative bloc as a whole), the populists always have an absolute majority within reach. It happened in 2009 – when the PSdG and the Bloc were evicted from the Galician government – even though the left had more votes. And it also happened twenty years earlier, in 1989, when Fraga won back the Xunta for the PP. On that occasion, the left and the Galicians scored three and a half points more than the Partit Popular and the CDS (and almost 40,000 votes ahead). And even so, the popular got half plus one of the seats in the Chamber.
The Galician left has only been able to win an absolute (adjusted) majority in the 2005 elections, when the Socialists and the 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 everything started then, in 1989, when the conjunction of the electoral system with the dispersion of the left and Galicianism facilitated the decisive seat for Fraga to govern the Xunta. With the results of A Coruña, Lugo and Pontevedra, the popular and the Galician left were tied at 30 seats. Certainly, if the more than 72,000 votes that Galicianism gathered in Pontevedra had been presented in one, two or even three brands, instead of four (and wasting more than 17,000 ballots that did not get representation), this space politician would have obtained one more seat at the expense of the PP. And in that case, the result of Ourense would have been irrelevant.
Nevertheless, in the constituency of Orense, a margin of 110 ballots in the case of the BNG, and of 464, in the case of the Socialists, allowed Fraga to claim an absolute majority, taking seat number eight and totaling the 38 of the majority of the House. In Ourense, the dispersion of Galician nationalism left almost 20,000 voters without representation, while the radical left wasted another 2,300 ballots.
More than three decades later, the lesson should be clear for the left and the Galician nationalists if they aspire to defeat the PP in such an adverse scenario. On 23-J they got 31,000 more votes than the conservative bloc, but they got three fewer seats.
