The black 28-M of Melilla: from "large-scale" fraud to the threat of a historic abstention
Melilla has been one of the epicenters of the campaign that today will lead to the polls. The alleged vote-buying scandal has shaken the entire country, but its effects are felt above any other site in the autonomous city, which today could register a new record number of abstentions as a result of the annulment of more half of the votes cast by mail.
The percentages of previous citations show that Melilla, by itself, is a territory with very low participation rates: in recent years (63.4% in 2019 and 60.79% in 2015) the numbers had increased slightly compared to the first decade of the 21st century, when participation was always around 57%.
Now, the approval of just 49% of the vote by mail requested in these elections (5,814 votes, out of a total of 11,727 requests), significantly reduces the number of Melillans who can exercise their right on this occasion and opens the door for the percentage of participation falls to historic lows in the autonomous city, never registered even in any autonomy throughout the democratic period.
The suspicions of “large-scale fraud” that ended up blowing up the vote-buying case involving one of the government parties of the autonomous city, Coalición Por Melilla (CpM), stemmed precisely from the high rate of requests made this year to vote by mail. The data tripled compared to 2019 to more than a fifth, based on a census of 60,000 people, the people of Melilla who opted for this modality in the face of 28-M. Now, the cancellation of a large part of those requests lowers electoral participation by mail in Melilla to normal levels.
All of this at a time of some tension in the autonomous city, which is going to the polls today with the still recent memory of the assault on the border fence with Morocco last June, almost a year ago, and with the shadow of Rabat looming over the alleged irregularities known this last week, as denounced by a large part of the political parties, which have even raised their concern to Brussels.
In any case, low turnout and misgivings about the electoral processes in Melilla are issues that have gone hand in hand in the autonomous city for decades.. In fact, there were already elections in the past marked by the shadow of “pucherazos”: in the 1989 general elections it was even necessary to repeat the elections after the deputy that the PSOE won for Melilla was challenged by the PP when finding irregularities in the census. In 2007, for its part, it was the PSOE that brought to court a possible fraud of the law in the autonomous elections that directly affected the leadership of the PP in the autonomous city at that time, but the issue was finally dismissed.
Now, given the uncertainty and confusion that reigns in a city shaken a few days before the elections by this new scandal, the State security forces and bodies will be in charge of ensuring compliance and transparency of the electoral process in Melilla.. The troops have increased by 7% compared to the previous electoral call to achieve a record armor: 594 agents will protect the polling stations and the streets of the autonomous city, which means one for every 83 voters. At the national level, the deployment is also unprecedented: more than 99,000 troops throughout Spain, which is the largest security operation carried out in our country ahead of election day.
Meanwhile, the Government guarantees the transparency of the process and ensures that the various cases of buying and selling votes detected in recent days will not affect the system or the confidence of citizens. The Secretary of State for Communication, Francesc Vallès, predicted yesterday that both in Melilla and in the rest of Spain people “will participate as they always have.”