The foreign vote complicates the options of Pedro Sánchez to assemble a new Government with the majority of the investiture. The Madrid recount has ended up giving the PP 16th seat at the expense of the PSOE 11th, which leaves the two blocks at 171 seats and forces the current president to convince Junts to vote in the affirmative to continue in Moncloa. Until now, it only needed abstention, but the 233,688 votes that have come from the embassies have ended up further adjusting the result of 23-J.
After almost three hours of counting, the PP has managed to recover the gap of 1,749 votes with which the election night ended. The advantage of the popular has allowed the overturn. The seat is for Carlos García-Adanero, a former UPN deputy who went to the PP after the controversy over the labor reform. In the Central Electoral Board they will not have official data until Monday.
It is common for the CERA vote to behave in a similar way to the general result. In Madrid, the PP won on 23-J with 40.51% of the votes compared to 27.88% for the PSOE. And so it has been, the popular ones have prevailed with enough margin to snatch the eleventh seat from the socialists. The recount lasted throughout the day and, in fact, began around 8:00 p.m. on Friday, since first the letters with the ballots must be sorted in different ballot boxes in a job that was done in some rooms in the Casa de Field attended by numerous representatives of the parties, as occurs on election night.
Participation has risen to 10.04% throughout the country of the 2.3 million Spanish residents abroad, almost 4 points more than in the last general ones, those of November 2019. This is so after the system of voting requested was eliminated, which made it difficult for Spaniards living outside the country to participate as they had to actively request suffrage. Since this system came into force, participation began to drop, reaching its floor in 2011 with 4.59%.
🚨Poll boxes open, we begin to count the CERA of Madrid🚨 pic.twitter.com/PkPqP2hVGe
—R. Ricardo Rosas Romera (@r_romera) July 28, 2023
The rest of the provinces
The other provinces where there were more possibilities of change in the last seat have been resolved throughout the day. The most relevant were Girona, Tarragona and Cantabria. The case of the Catalan provinces is striking, since the last seat of Junts was in dispute for both the PP and the PSOE, but in the middle of the afternoon it was the nationalist formation that confirmed to Europa Press that it retained both seats.
The popular ones stayed closer in Girona, only 363 ballots from the neoconvergents. The difficulty here was that Carles Puigdemont's party is the third force, with 47,234 votes, while the PP is the fifth most voted option, with 31,042. In Tarragona it is the PSC who can scratch a seat from Junts and is 1,298 votes away. The Socialists achieved 120,428 compared to 40,593, that is, for each independence vote there are 3 votes for the party of the fist and the rose. Although the Socialists have prevailed in the CERA vote, it has not been enough to turn the tables and reinforce the majority of Pedro Sánchez to the detriment of precisely the party on which his investiture ultimately depends.
In Cantabria, the relevance for the government formation process was less, since the PP was 428 votes away from taking Vox's seat, so the movement was within the right-wing bloc. In any case, the popular, who were second force, did not achieve enough advantage to steal a seat from those of Santiago Abascal.
The rest of the dances were more complicated despite the fact that the Socialists ended the election night convinced that a couple of seats could turn in their favor, as was the case in Malaga or Salamanca, but on the same Monday after the polls closed the message of Ferraz was conservative. Sources from the Sánchez Executive also ruled out any possibility on Wednesday.
In Malaga, the popular ones prevailed, although by a margin of less than 100 votes (1,878 of the PP against 1,780 of the PSOE). In Salamanca and Cuenca, the PSOE was the most voted, but did not get enough votes to scratch the PP's votes. A PSOE seat in Albacete was at risk, but the Socialists have won the distribution of the CERA vote in the Castilian-La Mancha province, so there were no modifications. Doubts are still cast in Tenerife, where Sumar could get a deputy at the expense of the PSOE, but there is no data in this regard at this time.