Spain holds municipal and regional elections this Sunday with strong projection for national election

A Spain holds municipal and regional elections this Sunday, the 28th, after a campaign marked by allegations of vote buying and the polarization between right and left before the general elections at the end of the year. In these elections, 35.6 million people are called to the polls to elect their representatives in 12 autonomous communities and 8,131 municipalities in Spain. The assemblies of the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, in North Africa, and of the insular councils, exclusive administrative entities of the Canary Islands, will also be renewed. In tomorrow’s elections, 1.7 million young people between the ages of 18 and 23 will vote for the first time, equivalent to 5% of the total voter census, in addition to 414,000 foreign residents in Spain. To ensure that no incident hinders the progress of the elections, the Spanish Ministry of the Interior is going to mobilize a device of nearly 100,000 agents from the State security forces. The nearly 23,000 polling stations will open their doors at 9:00 am (local time, 4:00 am Brasília time) and close at 20:00 pm (15:00 pm Brasília time).

Tomorrow’s voting has been considered a kind of rehearsal for the general elections, which, if they are not anticipated, should be held at the end of the year. The result of the polls will show whether, with the proximity of the general elections, the left, which governs in coalition in Spain, maintains the voters’ support to remain in power or if the conservatives can return to govern the country, in a possible pact with the extreme right. In general, the campaign was very marked by themes of national interest, such as housing, with the announcement made by the president of the Spanish government, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, of thousands of social housing and aid for young people with low incomes, and millionaire subsidies for the agricultural sector, especially affected by the lack of rain. In addition, the inclusion by EH Bildu of candidates convicted of terrorism caused controversy, after which this Basque independence party announced that it would remove those who committed terrorist acts with deaths.

However, the great controversy of the campaign’s final stretch came with a series of complaints of vote buying in different parts of the country – the most notable in the autonomous city of Melilla -, something unusual in more than four decades since the recovery of democracy in Spain, where until now these cases were very specific.
Some of these complaints affect candidates from different parties, who are among those arrested for alleged fraud, especially in voting by correspondence. Faced with this situation, the Secretary of State for Communication of the Spanish government, Francès Vallès, today guaranteed the transparency, security and neutrality of these elections and stated that the electoral process in Spain is “one of the safest and most guaranteed in the world”. “We believe that citizens will participate as they always have in an electoral process. The detected occurrences showed that the system works perfectly, detects and repairs”, highlighted Vallès this Saturday, during a press conference in which data on the organization of tomorrow’s elections were released.

*With information from the EFE agency