More than a million citizens residing abroad will be able to vote in the regional elections in May, which will be held in 12 CCAAs, Ceuta and Melilla
MADRID, May 7. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Popular Party has mobilized these weeks to capture the vote of Spaniards residing abroad, which may be key in autonomies such as the Canary Islands and Asturias before the elections on May 28. These two communities have more than 162,000 and 123,000 voters abroad, respectively, and these ballots may affect the distribution of seats in their regional parliaments.
More than a million citizens living outside of Spain will be able to vote in the regional elections that will take place in 12 communities and in the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla. There are other regions with a high number of emigrants, such as Galicia, Andalusia or the Basque Country, but they do not have an appointment with the polls in May.
The PP led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo is aware of the importance of the suffrage of the people who appear in the Census of Absent Residents Abroad (CERA), which has changed governments in the past, as happened in the Galician elections of 2005, in the that this emigrant vote made Manuel Fraga lose his absolute majority in the Xunta, which came to be governed by the socialist Emilio Pérez Touriño.
A few years later, in March 2009, Feijóo also made his debut in the regional elections, losing a seat with the foreign vote, which went to the PSOE, although this did not jeopardize his first absolute majority (38 deputies) as had happened to his predecessor. In these last 15 years, his trips to Latin America have been constant, before as president of the Xunta and now as leader of the PP. Thus, in November he went on a tour that took him to Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Ecuador.
Faced with a markedly electoral year, the regional representatives of the PP abroad met last March –convened by the executive secretary of the Popular Exterior Party, Antonio Rodríguez Miranda– to analyze the situation of Spaniards abroad” and ” facilitate their electoral participation” on 28M through “actions in different countries and preparing graphic and audiovisual materials”.
National PP sources have explained to Europa Press that it is the regional candidates who have organized their respective campaigns and have devoted themselves to explaining in their territories the deadlines or voting centers abroad, as well as the novelties in the procedure after the end of the requested vote, which added complexity and bureaucratic obstacles to the right to vote.
THE END OF THE ‘ROGADO VOTE’ IS EXPECTED TO INCREASE PARTICIPATION
With the new system, after the end of the requested vote, voters will not have to request the ballot in advance as it appeared in the regulations approved in 2011, which caused participation to plummet and which has been reformed in 2022.
Therefore, this May 28 the first elections are held in which the new system is applied and the parties expect a considerable increase in the participation of Spaniards residing abroad, something that could influence the distribution of seats in some regional Parliaments , such as Asturias or the Canary Islands.
Of the 12 autonomies with elections in May, Madrid is the one with the highest number of voters abroad, 372,448 according to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), followed by the Canary Islands (162,109), the Valencian Community (125,708) and the Principality of Asturias (123,201).
Further away are Cantabria (41,069); Aragon (39,593); Murcia (37,536); Castilla-La Mancha (36,597); Balearic Islands (32,644); Navarre (29,812); Extremadura (28,789), La Rioja (17,652); Melilla (5,940); and Ceuta (2,959).
THE ASTURIAN PP TRUSTS THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT TO THE FOREIGN VOTE
In the case of Asturias, that emigrant vote could be key. In fact, the PP candidate for the Principality of Asturias, Diego Canga, maintains that “the party is very tight” and he is confident of his victory because “no survey includes the external vote.”
According to the ‘popular’, that foreign vote in Asturias represents 13% of the electorate and may be the differential key to oust the socialist Adrián Barbón. Of those more than 120,000 residents outside of Spain, some 80,000 live in Latin American countries and around 40,000 in European countries such as Belgium, which is home to more than 7,000 Asturians and where Canga himself has lived these years for his work as a senior official.
For this reason, Canga has tried to capture a good part of that vote with trips to Argentina, Chile and Mexico. “The foreign vote can give us that plus,” he publicly acknowledged this week at an informative meeting, in which he admitted that the ‘Feijóo effect’ is also noticeable in Asturias.
IN THE CANARY ISLANDS THE FOREIGN VOTE CAN DECIDE A SEAT IN EL HIERRO
For its part, the Canary Islands have more than 160,000 voters abroad, with Venezuela, Cuba and Argentina being the three countries with the largest number of Canarians with the right to vote on May 28.
Although this foreign vote is important in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Las Palmas and La Gomera, it could be decisive in the case of the island of El Hierro, which has three seats in the Canarian Parliament and this foreign vote could change one of them, according to Canarian PP sources.
The Canarian PP, which is confident that this foreign vote will increase, recalls that its current president, Manuel Domínguez, was born in Caracas because his parents emigrated to Venezuela, a country with which he maintains a “special relationship”, according to the sources consulted.
VALENCIAN COMMUNITY AND MADRID ALSO LOOKING FOR THAT VOTER
In the case of the Valencian Community and Madrid, the PP has focused its efforts above all on the “new Valencians” and the “new Madrid residents” who reside in the region and who will be able to vote in the municipal elections on May 28 if they are registered.
However, they have also carried out numerous explanatory actions to inform about the calendar and deadlines to promote the participation of Spaniards abroad. Madrid has 370,000 people from Madrid abroad, (especially in the US, Mexico and the United Kingdom) who could help Isabel Díaz Ayuso to get closer to the absolute majority that some surveys grant her. Last June, the Madrid president already traveled to Miami and met with the president of the PP in the United States, according to sources from her team.
The Valencian PP led by Carlos Mazón also wants to bet on that foreign vote and on migrants living in the Valencian Community. With this objective, last week he established the Secretariat of ‘New Valencians’ “as a space for the participation of foreigners in the party structure”, an area in which he has designated the Venezuelan Mary Ponte as responsible.
ALERT IN THE PP FOR THE NATIONALIZATIONS WITH THE MEMORY LAW
The electoral roll to be able to vote in the May 28 elections closed on February 1 and the ‘popular’ have demanded these weeks that the Government specify exactly how many nationalizations have occurred thanks to the Democratic Memory Law.
With this law – which entered into force in October – the possibility of obtaining nationality is given to “those born outside of Spain to a father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, who originally had been Spanish, and who, as a consequence of having suffered exile for political, ideological or belief reasons or sexual orientation and identity, had lost or renounced their Spanish nationality”.
According to data provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in the first three months of the entry into force of the Memory Law, more than 12,800 people have received Spanish nationality. Cuba, Mexico and Argentina are the three countries where more people have obtained Spanish nationality under this rule.
