Feijóo and the multiplication of votes
There are jokes that, besides being grotesque, are revealing. A recent example: Feijóo's claim that the party that wins the legislative elections should have a "bonus" reward in the form of receiving between 20 and 50 additional seats as a gift, which, if they had been voted for, would have been won by other parties. That is, to force an absolute majority by legal imperative, and thus save the winner from having to look for partners and make concessions.
In fact, the proposal is so ridiculous that it can be quickly dismissed: it doesn't fit the Constitution; therefore, a prior reform process would be necessary, which would have to go through an absolute majority requiring an agreement between the PP and the PSOE. In other words, the vote would be the first act of an institutional mutation that would effectively turn the regime into a two-party system, leaving other parties without practical influence. A commotion that at the moment does not seem to interest anyone more than the PP, nor that the citizenry finds very motivated. And least of all the PSOE, which has no reason to give a gift to the right in full authoritarian drift. That is, for pure group interest —and especially Feijóo's personal interest— the PP would take a step towards a manifest restriction of the basis of democracy, the vote, by falsifying the voters' decision in a way that the winning party would multiply its seats and, therefore, reduce the power of others.
The maneuver is so clumsy that it seems impossible for the PSOE to fall into temptation. Surely there is a sector of heirs of felipismo that would dream of this formula to make the rest of the parties marginal: everything for the PP and the PSOE. But it is not in Sánchez's music that Feijóo can find accompaniment: a major shake-up would be needed within the PSOE, resuming some vices of late felipismo, from which Sánchez has clearly distanced himself in his attempt to update social democracy, which some of his own find difficult to accept.
Feijóo's initiative is so transparent that the reasons are visible from afar. The first and main one, following the reactionary wave sweeping across Europe, is to draw a curtain over the dependence on Vox, seeking that thegifted seats for the PP send it into irrelevance and directly assume the shift towards post-democratic authoritarianism without resorting to the forms and noise of the far-right. The second, to marginalize minority parties and reduce the influence of peripheral nationalisms. In other words: to encapsulate Spanish politics by reducing the relevance of the vote of parties from peripheral nations, which would lose influence and negotiation capacity. And the third, to integrate the far-right without noise, trailing behind the PP. That is, faced with the inability to give voice and shape to a broad-spectrum political project in the conservative space, to degrade democratic representation withgifted seats, which can almost guarantee an absolute majority without major commitments.
Feijóo fears that he will not reach a majority on his own and seeks a bonus in the form of seats, that is, to adapt Congress to the two major parties and not to the country's reality, and to reduce politics to a PP-PSOE struggle in which the winner gets a bonus and can do without the others. They call it democracy, when societies are increasingly complex and simplifications suffocate. Feijóo has not earned authority or prestige through aggressive discourse with the adversary but absent of a concrete project for fear of the far-right, and now he wants to force the Constitution to protect himself from its pressure and to impudently modify democratic representation. For lack of votes, he seeks to be gifted seats. And he disguises it as a patriotic claim. Pathetic.