In the Galician elections there are flying seats. How it has to be. There is a reason why Galicia is the gateway to all Iberian storms and one of its greatest alcoholic hymns, O Pousa, alludes to going “by the wind” to the trusted tavern, and then “returning by the air.” These are ten parliamentary seats, according to demographic reality, they should be in Atlantic Galicia, the most progressive, but current legislation makes them migrate to Lugo and Ourense, the conservative constituencies par excellence.
They fly in the right lane. They constitute the second security network of the PP of Galicia to maintain its historic dominance in an autonomy that has governed for 36 of its 42 years of existence. The first line of defense of the popular, the most powerful, is made up of its imbrication in society and its patrimonial use of the Xunta, from which it has increasingly limited information pluralism, even to a greater extent than in the times of the presidency of Manuel Fraga, the former Francoist minister of “Disinformation”, as the historian Ángel Viñas calls it.
The winged seats are not, however, the daughters of Fraga, but of the Government of Adolfo Suárez, of his electoral engineering maneuvers to try to obtain, in a theoretically proportional system, the absolute majority in 1977 with just over a third of the votes that the polls gave him and that he finally obtained. The move consisted of doping their rural fiefdoms, with more seats than their share per population, which is, for example, the distribution procedure that has been used in neighboring Portugal since 1975.
This distortion to the detriment of the urban vote extended to all autonomies, except where it is impossible, because there is a single electoral district, such as Madrid or Murcia. The arithmetically highest deviation is reached in the Canary Islands, as well as in the Balearic Islands, Aragon and the Basque Country. But where it has had the most political effects has been in Catalonia, in favor of nationalism, contrary to what will likely happen today in Galicia.
Compared to the 33% deviation between the distribution of seats and the distribution of the population by constituencies in the Canary Islands, in Catalonia that percentage falls, according to 2020 data, to 13%, while in Galicia it is almost 15%. It has never influenced the overall outcome of the elections, but it has functioned as one of the powerful deterrent factors that has caused the center-left to not even attempt to compete for power in more than half of the eleven elections held so far.
The take-off runway for the flying seats is located in article 9.2 of the Galician electoral law. It establishes that each province has a minimum of 10 seats. Thus, of the 75 seats in the hemicycle of the Compostela Rúa do Horreo, 40 are awarded based on “hectares”, according to the expression that made fortune in the transition, and only 35 are distributed according to the population. In this way, A Coruña has 25 deputies Lugo and Ourense, 14 each and Pontevedra, 22. If only the demographic criterion governed, as in the Lisbon parliament, there would be 31 in A Coruña, 9 in Lugo, 9 in Ourense and 26 in Pontevedra . There are the flying seats, the six fewer in the A Coruña constituency and the four in Pontevedra, which become the five more in Lugo and Ourense.
In the last elections, those of 2020, the first practical effects of another electoral engineering maneuver were recorded, which in this case was the work of Fraga Iribarne, a professor of State Theory by profession. In 1992 he raised the minimum required for candidates to participate in the distribution of seats from 3% to 5% of valid votes. Below your threshold, your votes go directly to the trash bin even if they are enough to obtain representation. This was what happened four years ago in A Coruña and Pontevedra to Galicia en Común, one of the brands of the mutant political space now led by Yolanda Díaz.
In these elections the challenge of this candidacy, now called Sumar, is once again to exceed 5% in A Coruña and Pontevedra, constituencies with more than twenty seats at stake. On the other hand, in Lugo and Ourense 5% is not enough, because there are fewer deputies at stake. The exact threshold depends a lot on chance, but is around 6%. It is the level that Democracia Ourensna (DO), the party of the eccentric mayor of Ourense, Gonzlao Pérez Jácome, must reach.
Jácome would have the seat assured if he headed the DO list. He could not, because to do so he would have had to resign as mayor, in accordance with the great singularity of Galician legislation. This is another electoral engineering maneuver by the Fraga Iribarne factory. If with the 5% he wanted to finish annihilating the Galician center-right, to absorb it, the objective of the veto of the mayors was to close the way to who the “boss” of the right considered his most dangerous potential enemy, the socialist from Coruña Francisco Vazquez. The move caused the paradox that, for example, the mayor of Santiago, the nationalist Goretti Sanmartín, could, if the BNG presented her and she were elected, make her position compatible with that of a representative 600 kilometers away, in Congress, but she does not have the ability to even stand for a seat in the Galician Parliament, which is 1,000 meters from his office.
Of these three elements of electoral engineering, the 5% is the most striking. That of the ineligibility of the mayors appears to be the most “enxebre” (typical of Galicia). And the one with the flying seats is the most relevant, at least in theory. In O Pousa it is sung, in Galician, that “I went to my compadre’s tavern. I went by the wind and I came by the air. And, as if by enchantment, I went through the air and I came through the wind.” The ten flying seats go from west to east and do not return.
