That of the Galician on the stairs is a cliché as widespread and established as it is erroneous, in addition to frequently containing a pejorative load, when it refers to duplicity, to the concealment of true attentions. The Galician is not only very aware of whether he is ascending or descending, but he also knows perfectly well the direction of each of his countrymen with whom he passes between steps. As the anthropologist Manuel Madianes once explained in La Voz de Galicia, the question of whether it goes up or down “will never be asked by one Galician to another, because they are in the same linguistic key, of thought and experiences.” The cliché reflects the ignorance, often due to apathy, of the Galician character, which is not so difficult to decipher if there is the will to do so. The same thing happens with numerous electoral myths that were debunked at the polls on Sunday, which does not prevent them from remaining valid and even becoming stronger.

The fief exists, of course, but it is not electoral Galicia as a whole, but the Xunta. Since 2014, since the collapse of the two-party system in Spain and the emergence of the logic of ideological blocs, the popular Galicians, adding to their allies from Ciudadanos and Vox, have lost all European, municipal and general elections to the progressive bloc, except the 2016, although in 2023 they won in seats, but not in votes. They once had around three quarters of the Galician mayors and today, they have less than half. Thus, the question on Sunday was whether the Xunta was going to continue being an island in progressive Galicia or if the regional elections were going to be standardized with the rest of the elections. With debutant Alfonso Rueda headlining and Alberto Núñez Feijóo in Madrid’s Génova, like Fraga and Rajoy before, the PP held on to its fiefdom, the Xunta. And for the first time he has managed to complete a succession without losing power.

It is an irreducible myth, which enjoys iron health. The progressive candidates, especially from the PSOE, repeat in the campaign like a mantra the idea that only by filling the ballot boxes with votes will it be possible to evict the PP from the Xunta, which it considers its own and, in practice it is, since it has had it 36 of 42 years, which will be 40 out of 46 if Rueda completes the legislature. The thesis that high participation benefits the left was verified in 2005, when Fraga fell with the highest turnout at the polls until then, but it was refuted in 2009 by Feijóo’s victory, with an even higher percentage of voters on the census. And with Rueda’s victory it has happened again, although in a less resounding way.

The Galician electoral fog becomes very thick, like that of London’s sometimes wintery Lugo, in the field of participation. Two phenomena intersect, the enormous weight of the foreign census, with almost half a million voters and less than 40,000 voters, and the disaster of official electoral information in Spain. Portugal or Peru, for example, offer data separately for the interior, exterior and total. The Government and the autonomies do not do it, but election night after election night, without anyone saying anything, they fall into the nonsense of not comparing that same data with four years ago, but with the end, which includes foreigners. Thus, the Xunta assures that on 18-F there was an increase of 18 points, even though it was 8.4 points. There is talk of a historical record of 67.3%, a mirror that will disappear next Monday when the abstention from outside Galicia is computed and the final data appears, which should be around 57%. Even so, Sunday’s 67.3% participation in Galician territory was the third highest ever, very close to the 68.1% in 2005 and below the 70.5% in 2009, when Feijóo won for the first time.

In the book full of inaccuracies and gross errors that the Center for Political and Constitutional Studies published in 2022 under the title of The vote of Spaniards abroad, it is stated that in Galicia this vote “has been decisive in various regional elections.” It never happen. It only happened in Asturias, in 2012. In Galicia, the foreign count caused four changes of seats, in 1989, 1997, 2009 and 2020, but none had any impact on governability or on the correlation of forces in Parliament. Even so, it is repeated that in Galicia emigration has been decisive, despite the fact that in reality it is the diaspora that votes, a community formed mainly by children and grandchildren of emigrants, since those born in Galicia are less than a third. This diaspora , with its colossal census, has the potential to be decisive, but until now it has never happened.

In the general elections of 2023, when the Bloc advanced only 1.3 points compared to 2019 and its once again only deputy in Congress contrasted with Ana Pontón’s excessive claims to even have its own group, the voices that placed to the BNG in the regional governments at most its historical ceiling of 1997, with 25% of Xosé Manuel Beiras. This is one point more than what the current leader obtained in 2020. On Sunday she shattered that historical mark with 31.6% of the votes and, what is much more important, she surpassed the 30% threshold, something that Only the three major Spanish parties that had existed since 1977, UCD, PP and PSOE, had achieved it. It should not be long before it is ensured that this rounding, 32% is the maximum that the Bloc can obtain, despite the fact that recent events should encourage caution.

Since fifteen years ago, on the day of reflection in Lugo, the Galician socialist barons, with the all-powerful José Blanco at their head, decided to cut off the head of the then president of the Xunta Emilio Pérez Touriño if, as they feared and happened, he lost the next day , the PSdeG-PSOE has not presented a real candidate for the presidency of the Xunta again. Immersed in an incessant and crazy fight, he has not stopped changing leaders and on this occasion, by betting on José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, he did it almost at the last minute. In the twelve Galician elections, the socialists have had nine candidates, compared to four from the PP and the same number from the BNG, although in eleven calls. Only Fernando González Laxe, on one occasion, and Touriño, on two occasions, repeated. Now it is undeniable that this is the PSdeG’s biggest problem, but it is noticed just when it has a leader who has gotten the worst result ever by far.

The rigged distribution of seats in favor of the conservative Lugo and Ourense, which takes away from the progressive Atlantic Galicia ten seats that would correspond to it if the distribution were made according to strict demographic criteria, as in Portugal, announced that the foreseeable entry in recent days in the Parliament of the Orense cantonalism of the party of the bizarre mayor of the capital Gonzalo Pérez Jácome would be a consequence of this distortion of the principle of one person, one vote. However, Jácome obtained such a spectacular result, 9% in the province and 18% in the capital, that his deputy would have obtained even if Ourense had the nine that it is assigned by population, since precisely his seat was the ninth to be awarded in the distribution of the fourteen that this constituency has.

Yolanda Díaz, who in a decade went from being spokesperson for a group of two councilors in Ferrol to second vice president of the Government, in the last five years became a Galician electoral myth in herself. The CIS elevated her for months and months as the best-rated politician in Spain. However, it was a dangerous title, due to antecedents such as those of Rosa Díez and Albert Rivera. In 2020, although the pandemic was decisive in the launch of her image as Minister of Labor, she had already shown her limited pull in Galicia, since her involvement in the campaign did not prevent Galicia en Común from stay out of Parliament. In the 2023 general elections, she managed to maintain the space that Pablo Iglesias had created at the head of Podemos and his allies, although with seven fewer deputies and below the enormous expectations that there were at times. But on Sunday she took a huge hit in Galicia, through her close friend from her youth, Marta Lois, whom she nominated as Sumar’s candidate. Her 1.9% of the votes is not so far from the around 1% that Yolanda Díaz herself obtained at the head of the Galician United Left in 2005 and 2009. However, those who anticipate her political funeral in Madrid should not forget, for not go further back in time, the five years that his countryman Mariano Rajoy endured in Moncloa after the publication of his party’s clandestine accounting. The one about the Galician politician bolted to the chair is a myth that is more than true.