Do the votes or the seats rule? The claim of the PP to be allowed to govern when it is the party with the most votes leads to a logic that collides with the institutional functioning of Spanish democracy. In Spain the electors elect the Parliament which, in turn, elects the President of the Government. And that’s how parliamentary monarchies work. It is in presidentialist republics (and not in all) that the citizens directly elect the head of state (which is also the head of government). That’s why cheating the rules of legitimacy is dangerous. In Catalonia, after the secessionist failure in the so-called “plebiscitary elections” of 2015 – which were supposed to measure support for independence in votes -, some of its promoters suddenly changed their criteria and opted to count only seats. A self-deception of catastrophic consequences.
Now, the problem with putting extreme emphasis on the popular vote is that it could end up delegitimizing a good part of the governments that have been set up in Spain, and especially those presided over by the PP. For example, in 1996 the investiture of José María Aznar – also endorsed by CiU, the PNB and Coalició Canària – had the indirect support of almost eleven and a half million votes (those adding up all the formations that gave him the absolute majority in seats). But if only the votes were counted, the rejection of his candidacy was then close to 13 million votes (those obtained by the PSOE, IU and the left-wing nationalists). And those 13 million voters constituted 51% of those who went to the polls. Could it then be said that Aznar came to the central government against the express will of more than half of the Spaniards?
If the same logic were to be applied, the government of Mariano Rajoy that emerged from the 2016 elections would face an identical problem. Aside from the democratic anomaly that meant that the main opposition party gave him the presidency for free through the self-imposed abstention of 68 socialist deputies, his legitimacy would be questioned if it had to be based only on the votes that were behind the formations that gave him parliamentary support (PP, Ciutadans and Coalició Canària). Those parties had a little more than 11 million votes. However, the bloc opposed to a PP executive numbered more than 12 million voters (out of the 24 million who voted in June 2016). Did Rajoy have a legitimacy problem?
The constitutional answer is no, the same as the motion of censure that threw out the leader of the PP in 2018. It is clear that you put the democratic magnifying glass only on the votes, the motion of censure that brought Pedro Sánchez to the Moncloa it would have more legitimacy, since it had a million more voters than the center-right groups. It is clear that perhaps it was that selective magnifying glass that led Pablo Casado to delegitimize the PSOE and Unides Podemos cabinet that emerged from the November 2019 elections. In that investiture, the formations that supported Sánchez represented 315,000 fewer voters than all the groups in they voted against.
Finally, the investiture to which Alberto Núñez Feijóo will undergo on September 26 would not withstand the sieve of the popular vote either. The formations that have promised him support (Vox, Coalició Canària and UPN) add up to the PP with almost 11,300,000 votes. On the contrary, the groups that have expressed their rejection have about 12,400,000 votes; that is to say, more than 50% of those who went to vote on July 23. But they rule the seats. And even though they didn’t give him a majority either, Feijóo should keep in mind that with just a third of the ballots he got almost 40% of the deputies.
