Florida’s vote, decisive in the United States, had a great weight in obtaining one more deputy for the Madrid PP at the expense of the PSOE. The Miami consulate was the fourth with the most ballots and there is little doubt about its popular orientation. But the change of the seat that forces the socialists to count on the support of Junts was not forged in the United Kingdom, Germany, the USA or France, in that order the countries with the most votes. The key was in Spain, with a tiny difference on election night that made the outside matter. In Madrid, the regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, had worked to secure her absolute majority and the PP had been reborn.
It is the change of a seat for the most politically relevant external vote recorded so far in Spain, as it affects the investiture and is registered in the Madrid amplifier. The previous milestone was in 2012 in Asturias, when by a handful of votes the PSOE wrested a seat in Foro, which gave it power.
In May 2022, when he became president of the regional PP, Ayuso created a secretariat of Madrid people in the world, when the Cortes repealed the requested vote. Nothing indicated that this modest area of ??the executive was crucial, but it was a gesture with the outside world.
The president and her official adviser, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, set out to find the expensive absolute majority in the capital, which with its unique constituency can reach 48% of the votes. Thus, she sought the vote of nationalized Latin Americans in Madrid and abroad, that of expatriates, with that televised approach of Spaniards in the world, which the PP believe works. He traveled to the United States, to Florida of course, and to London, albeit with an official economic approach. Aided by another suicide from the Madrid left, in the end she achieved her goal without needing the external vote.
The popular leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, ended up being the beneficiary of the efforts of his internal counterpower in the party, even if the Madrid seat of the generals does not compensate for the bitterness of his frustrated triumphant expectations. With the former Galician president at the helm, very active in the diaspora for 18 years, and with the Secretary of Emigration of the Xunta as responsible for foreign affairs, Antonio Rodríguez Miranda, the PP achieved its first victory in out since 2004, with a margin of 8,000 votes. However, it corresponds to the advantage achieved in Madrid, over Galicia’s 6,000, although with an increase abroad three points higher than that of Spain.
As is natural in these cases, the Madrid PP lacked time to create its epic of a prodigious feat abroad, which would have gone unnoticed if in the scrutiny of the 23-J it had not remained at a 0 .05% of the last seat. The most relevant thing for the foreign vote to influence is not the campaign, the geography of the diaspora, nor the weight of the foreign census, since if that were the case in Ourense, the result would always change and it has never happened in the general elections. In Afghanistan, for example, in 2004 and in the middle of the war, 11% of votes were from outside, but in a case as extreme as this, with a clear difference inside, so much was the result from outside .
If it is low, like the 0.03% margin that the GNP had over the PP in Biscay in November 2019, another factor is involved, that of a divergent result abroad. The PNB had ten points less than in the interior and the PP five more. And since there was enough voting volume for the change, the seat was popular.
In the Madrid diaspora, as in the Spanish diaspora, more than 70% of those registered were born abroad. Its particularity lies in the fact that its census multiplied by 2.7 since 2003 compared to 2.1 for Spain. And that in this census there are emigrants from the last crisis, expatriates due to the mobility of globalization, the legacy of the scarce emigration of the past, the post of exile and a group of nationalized people from other provinces, censused in Madrid due to lack of data or other reasons, as well as the vast majority of the 60,000 Sephardim with Spanish passports and former immigrants, for example from Ecuador, who returned home with dual nationality. An amalgam of the imprint of migratory flows, globalization and centralist bureaucracy.
