The dirty game with the grandchildren

One of the disputes on the playing field of these elections is whether to allow the vote of those children and grandchildren of people who lost their Spanish nationality due to exile. The Supreme Court –who else?– has struck a blow to the PSOE's aspirations to allow tens of thousands of people abroad to vote, understanding that it is a type of electorate that favors them for obvious reasons. It could be said, however, that the high court has left this pretension tied... and well tied. The right-wing newspapers celebrate it with headlines such as “The Supreme Court dismantles the external census designed by the government” (La Razón) although others like El Mundo still see options for the wily Sánchez: “The government clings to Pumpido to save "the vote of the grandchildren"”. In this case, the spiciest headline is, understandably, that of El País, with “The Supreme Court suspends the right to vote of 163,000 Spaniards”. Expressed this way, without any reference to the controversial law, it is a formulation that conveys to the reader an electoral fraud: if they are Spanish, how is it that they are not allowed to vote? On the other hand, it is precisely this fast track of distributing nationalities that is seen as an attempt to adulterate the elections.

And, in between, the idea that the elections are a fix is raining down on the common parish. I will not start defending a Spanish democracy that is, to put it very mildly, highly perfectible. But feeding the idea of stolen elections is a dangerous path. The novelty is that the left stops playing the fool and signs up for this narrative: perhaps it is more useful than the moral superiority it has brandished, if it aspires to curb the far-right with its own weapons. But polarization in the United States led to the assault on the Capitol. And in Spain, with the historical precedents that accompany us, tight results could unleash tensions unprecedented in recent decades.