The Government has taken the Supreme Court’s decision to suspend the voting rights of beneficiaries of the so-called grandchildren’s law until they prove they are children or grandchildren of exiles as a new affront from a court with which it has had several major clashes this legislature, from the suspension of the amnesty law to prevent its application to Carles Puigdemont to the conviction of the former Attorney General of the State. This time it is not the Criminal Chamber, with Manuel Marchena as the strongman, but the Administrative Litigation Chamber, but the Government makes a similar political analysis to previous occasions.
Various members of the Government consulted see behind this decision the hand of a court clearly controlled by conservative sectors and therefore suspect a new maneuver to facilitate opposition positions — the plaintiff is Vox and the far-right party Iustitia Europa — and weaken the Executive. “It is a provocation,” say several members of the Government consulted. What worries the ministers most is that, with this decision, the Supreme Court, the country’s main court, is not only annulling a fundamental right such as the vote for tens of thousands of full-right Spaniards who retain their nationality but are left unable to vote, something unprecedented, but above all it is encouraging what La Moncloa sees as a conspiracy theory of the PP and Vox, a “hoax,” that is, that Pedro Sánchez and his team have designed a formula through the grandchildren’s law to do “electoral engineering” and improve their results with new voters.
The reality, explain various members of the Government who closely follow this process, is that the vast majority of these new Spaniards have no intention of voting — participation in America, where most come from, is very low — that voting abroad almost never changes any seat — the last time it did was in 2023 in favor of the PP — and that it is impossible to think that the entire consular administration, which handles this process, could be secretly organized to favor the left, when no one can know what the few who exercise that right will vote. “They have swallowed the whole hoax, but these are not people making content on social media, they are Supreme Court judges. It is unheard of. They are going to leave thousands of Spaniards without the right to vote,” summarizes a member of the Executive.
The Government also decided to publicly make clear its rejection of this decision, something not so common and very rare until a few years ago. The spokesperson, Elma Sáiz, expressly and officially said that the Government “does not share” the provisional ruling of the high court. Félix Bolaños, Minister of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Cortes, also said so. The ruling is “hardly understandable,” concluded the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente.
Bolaños went further and urged the magistrates of the high court to resolve the issue as soon as possible, especially before the elections scheduled for 2027. “I think it is a decision of enormous significance, because we are talking about suspending the voting rights of thousands of Spaniards,” said the Minister of Justice: “We are talking about the most sacred thing in democracy, which is the right to vote.”
Sumar, a minority government partner, went further, and through its parliamentary spokesperson, Verónica Barbero, assured that the measure is “extremely worrying” because it “opens the way to a very dangerous anti-democratic drift” by restricting the right to vote to those who meet the requirement for it. That is, to people with Spanish nationality” and because, in their opinion, it is “yet another proof that the Judiciary does not want this Government to govern.” In a message sent to the media, the spokesperson adds that “it is very difficult for any progressive person in this country to trust the Justice system at this time.” This message that Sumar publicly launched, that this would be another ruling to try to harm the Government, is shared in private by the socialist sector of the Executive, which sees many judges already openly campaigning against Sánchez and his decisions.
On the other side of the political spectrum, there are only celebrations. While the Popular Party welcomes the decision of the high court, Vox boasts of having achieved the ruling as a claimant party in the process along with the party Iustitia Europa. The ultra party’s spokesperson in Congress, Pepa Millán, highlighted in a press conference in the lower chamber that Vox is “the only party with parliamentary representation” that has managed to “suspend the electoral effects” of the grandchildren’s law and “the attempt at electoral manipulation for the next elections.”
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“Some just warned about it,” Millán emphasized in clear reference to the PP, “and others of us have managed to stop Pedro Sánchez’s goal of perpetrating a coup in the next general elections through the adulteration of the census.” “We have stopped the illegal alteration of the census by the Socialist Party, but it is not enough,” added Jorge Buxadé, Vox’s European deputy and spokesperson for its legal department, in a statement.
The Populars point out, for their part, “the blow” that the decision represents for what they interpret as an attempt by the Government to “brazenly alter” the general elections. This is how the party’s number three and Deputy Secretary of Sectoral Coordination, Alma Ezcurra, expressed herself, who, in a video released to the media, stated: “Certainly, we congratulate ourselves on the blow from Justice to the Government’s attempt to forcibly include hundreds of thousands of people in the electoral census.” “We were right,” added Alberto Núñez Feijóo on social media, president of the PP (whose party is not part of the procedure).
The matter reached the Senate plenary, where the opposition showed its euphoria and the Government called for restraint in the face of a decision that is not yet final. Bolaños was clear. “I see you celebrate it,” he said to the PP. “Let’s wait for the ruling on the substance of the matter. I did not see you celebrate the ECJ’s ruling, definitive, on the amnesty law,” he insisted, referring to the ruling that supports the law.
The Supreme Court’s decision leaves in the air the voting rights of more than 2.4 million people who, according to the latest data provided at the end of June by the Ministry of Territorial Policy, started the procedures under the ‘grandchildren’s law’. In reality, according to the minister, only half a million of them could vote in 2027, because the files take many months.
This regulation establishes the immediate registration in the Electoral Census of Absent Residents (CERA) of those naturalized through this route and a subsequent instruction from the Ministry of Justice established that, for this, it was not necessary to prove the condition of descendant of an exile: “The condition of exile will be presumed for all Spaniards who left Spain between July 18, 1936, and December 31, 1955,” the text states. The electoral effects of this interpretation of the law are what the high court has now limited until it issues a ruling on the appeal filed by the two far-right parties. The Government insists that there is no possibility of manipulation because the entire process is transparent and controlled by the consulates, an administration in which the Executive could not interfere for something as serious as manipulating the vote or the census without it being known.