The scrutiny of the external vote of Ourense carried out this Monday does not modify the distribution of deputies in the Galician Parliament that was established on election night, with 40 from the PP, 25 from the BNG, 9 from the PSdeG-PSOE and that of Democracia Ourensana . On February 18, the socialists had come close to winning one more seat for the Ourense constituency, falling 112 votes away from taking it from the PP. However, at the end of the diaspora count they were closer to taking it away from the BNG than from the Popular Party, with a distance of 69 ballots from the Bloc and 126 from the PP.
The review of the minutes of the scrutiny at the tables of the province of Ourense itself is still missing. Although the difference in favor of the Bloc is small, it does not seem easy for the socialists to be able to reverse it. In any case, in Galician politics the maxim governs that in Ourense there are never impossible things, as the mayor of the capital and leader of Democracia Ourensana, Gonzalo Pérez Jácome, has just demonstrated by making one of his collaborators a deputy in the Parliament of Galicia, something that was unthinkable a few months ago.
Although 6,123 voting envelopes from abroad arrived at the Provincial Electoral Board of Ourense, a quarter of them were discarded throughout the morning for not meeting the legal requirements. With 1,566 envelopes thrown onto the ballot, there were only 4,557 votes left to count, which represents a tiny participation, 4.4% of the colossal external census of Ourense, of 103,540 voters, which represents 29% of the province’s total. a percentage that is not exceeded in any of them, but it is in some autonomous constituencies of lower territorial scope, such as that of the Canary island of La Gomera.
Although the numbers from the election night indicated that the party threatened by the PSOE in the count abroad was the PP, tranquility reigned in the popular ranks since Sunday the 18th, since it was considered that if the socialists got one more deputy it would be coast of the PSOE. All the recent precedents played in favor of the PP, since it is the party that won the four deputies that changed hands in Spain since 2019 due to the effect of the external vote, that of the 2023 general elections in Madrid, those of the regional elections of Galicia and Euskadi of 2020 and that of the 2019 general elections in Euskadi. And indeed, the PP was armored by its greater strength abroad.
The Popular Party won among the Orense diaspora with 56.5% of the votes, 6.6 points more than in the interior. The Block achieved a creditable second place, in the context of its structural weakness abroad, although it obtained 13.7%, which is almost half of what it had within Ourense. On the other hand, the PSOE came closer abroad to its result at home, with 10.3%, compared to 12.4% on election night. As expected, due to the novel nature of his candidacy, due to his lack of structure abroad and his own rather carnivalesque characteristics, difficult to transmit abroad, Jácome played a part in the diaspora, with only 2.9% of the votes, compared to the quite spectacular 8.9% he got within the province.
In Ourense the clear absolute majority that the current president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, obtained on election night was not at stake. By not changing the distribution of deputies, the PP is left with 40, two less than in 2024, while the BNG continues with its 25, six more than four years ago, and the PSOE remains sunk in its historic well of 9 seats, compared to 14 in the previous Galician elections, in which Democracia Ourensana had not presented itself.
