At 10:00 p.m. on Sunday, the specter of Donald Trump burst into the Spanish ballot boxes. The 180,942 members of the mesas had counted 53% of the votes cast when the PP took the lead in seats, with 131, to the PSOE’s 130. The ghost of the ineffable former president of the United States was haunting Spain because the populars were below the socialists in percentage of the vote, at 1.8 points, a distance that would take about 50 minutes to overcome, while the difference in deputies in his favor did not stop to gain weight in this time, up to 12.
It was a short-lived, but significant, version of Republican Trump’s delegate victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, despite losing by 2 percent. It was a repeat of the triumph, under the same circumstances, of co-religionist George W. Bush against Al Gore in 2000. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also won seats, but not ballots, in the last two elections. And in autonomous Spain it happened in Catalonia, twice, with CiU first in deputies and the PSC in the lead in votes; in Euskadi, with the PSOE and the PNB, respectively; in Asturias, with Fòrum and the PSOE, and in the Canaries with Coalició Canària and PSOE and PP, since in 2015 CC was third in votes and first in seats.
The Trump effect on 23-J was symbolic, since, even if Feijóo tried so hard, it was not a presidential election, but a parliamentary one. Since the scrutiny passed the third, the main enigma had already been clarified, due to the fact that it was clear that PP and Vox did not add up and the unknown resided in whether the PSOE would need Junts.
This almost a third of the scrutiny, between 53% and approximately 85% with the PSOE leading in votes and the PP in seats, is revealing. It showed that in a tight scenario, like the one that existed from 21.51 on Sunday, the popular have many options to obtain more seats in the Carrera de San Jerónimo than the socialists. The smaller the difference, the greater the possibilities. In the opposite direction, a priori it seems very complicated that they could achieve it with more than a 2% disadvantage.
Perhaps the situation had already occurred, in the 1996 generals, the most contested. If so, it happened inadvertently. The count was not followed on the mobile to the minute nor was it commented on on Twitter.
Yes, it was known that it could happen, even if it wasn’t for the most visible part, that of the polls, since there was some polling in the phase before the no-confidence motion, with Ciutadans as the supposed first force in votes, which was unseated by the PP in deputies. Even if it did not transfer to the public, decades ago political science concluded that it was possible for the Popular to win more seats with fewer votes than the PSOE, due to the “conservative bias of the system”. It is the elegant way, and not very comprehensible to the general public, as is usual in this discipline, of claiming that the rules of the game are tilted to the right.
The fundamental reason lies in genetics. The system was designed by the government of Adolfo Suárez, albeit with the consent of the democratic opposition. He did what the Politikon collective defined as “a sophisticated and admirable work of political manipulation”. It consisted of squeezing to the maximum the rural hegemony of the UCD, due to the conservative predominance in these areas and thanks to the recycling of the structures of the Movimiento, the sole party of the dictatorship. At the same time, it was a question of not paying dearly for Suarist weakness in the big cities, dominated by the left.
That is why in Spain there are, in reality, three electoral systems. One, that of the provinces with 10 seats or more, is proportional, with the aim that UCD took what it was due. There is another one with a majority, with constituencies that elect 5 or less, so that Suárez took an even larger portion of deputies than he was entitled to. The third, the intermediate, is a mixture of the other two, and, just as there were provinces very favorable to the government, there were also others hostile.
It has been 18 years since José Ramón Montero, the most prestigious Spanish election specialist, and the political scientist Ignacio Lago dissected the conservative bias of the system, based on provinces with five seats or less, generally right-wing. They have 35 more deputies than they would have by population, thanks to the fixed number of two for each constituency that punishes the most populous. In addition, the deputies are distributed with a large advantage for the two largest parties, especially the first. The rest hardly achieve anything.
On Sunday, Feijóo regained the sole deputy of Ceuta and consolidated that of Melilla. In Soria, he could do nothing other than draw one with the PSOE. But, of the eight provinces with three deputies, in seven he took two, for one socialist. Only Guadalajara escaped, because Vox entered. In Huesca, one of the examples of maximum profitability, with 38% of the votes it had 66% of the seats. In the constituencies of four he missed the targets in La Rioja and Burgos, but not in Lugo, Ourense and Salamanca. There, with about half the votes, he got 75% of the representation. It was in this majority subsystem that the PP’s advantage of 14 seats over the PSOE was confirmed, since in the interim it won by the minimum and in the proportional there was a balance, due to the decisive victory of the PSC in Barcelona
On Sunday, the leaning towards the right of the Spanish electoral board became evident, although it does not mean that it always harms the PSOE, since it benefited it in specific moments, when rivals were weak or divided, such as in the 1980s or in 2019. However, the conservative bias is evident in the global balance sheet since 1977 and in closely contested elections, such as Sunday’s. So, the PP prevailed by 1.4% in votes and 14 deputies, which are the equivalent of 4% of Congress.
