Spain's top court won't block 189,678 'grandchildren law' voters before 29 November
Spain's Supreme Court has refused, by majority, to extend a voting suspension to the 189,678 adult children of people who gained Spanish nationality under the 'grandchildren law'. They can vote in the 29 November general election. The 163,355 naturalised under a Justice Ministry instruction stay suspended, as they have been since 10 September.
The adult children of people who became Spanish under the so-called grandchildren law will be able to vote in Spain’s general election on 29 November. The administrative chamber of Spain’s Supreme Court on Monday refused, by majority, to extend to them the voting suspension already imposed on their parents, Euronews reported. That is 189,678 people, according to Spain’s Foreign Ministry, who vote from abroad.
What is Spain’s ‘grandchildren law’?
It is the popular name for a provision of the 2022 Democratic Memory Law that opened Spanish nationality to the children and grandchildren of people who lost it when they went into exile for political, ideological or sexual-orientation reasons. Demand from Latin America was heavy: the consulate-general in Buenos Aires alone naturalised 17,775 people.
The trouble lies in how it was applied. A Justice Ministry instruction told consulates to presume the exile of parents and grandparents who left Spain between 1936 and 1955, where the law required it to be proven. According to the State Attorney’s office, 163,355 people were naturalised under that presumption and just 901 under the law applied directly.
Why are the parents still barred from voting?
On 10 September the Supreme Court provisionally suspended the vote of those 163,000-plus, after appeals by Vox and the association Iustitia Europa against the Central Electoral Board’s refusal to clean up the register of Spaniards living abroad, known as CERA. That suspension stands.
Vox and Iustitia Europa then asked for it to cover the children too, who, by our count, outnumber their parents by about 26,000. The court said no, on timing. The request came after more than half the electoral period had run, a week before the campaign and a couple of weeks before consular voting opens. Rewriting the register now, the judges said, would cut against legal certainty and electoral stability. One judge dissented.
They did add a warning. The court sees growing signs of serious irregularities in how the overseas register was built, and the main case, on whether the ministry’s instruction was lawful, is still to be decided.
This election had already made headlines when Spain’s transport minister stepped down and left the Socialist list after the country’s rail crashes. For anyone in Portugal holding Spanish nationality through this route, the practical rule for now is simple. If your parent was naturalised under the grandchildren law, you can vote on 29 November. If you were naturalised under the ministry’s instruction yourself, you currently can’t.
Image: Luis García (Zaqarbal) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
