Loli Benlloch | Valencia (EFE) electoral appointment.
An election result in block code
Nothing is written about what the result of these elections will be, although in the case of the regional elections it seems clear that no single party will have an absolute majority in Les Corts and that either the left will govern for the third consecutive legislature, or there will be a change of cycle and it will happen to do it to the right.
Four years ago, the difference between the two ideological blocs was only 42,123 ballots. In these elections, it could be even tighter and reduce the range of seats, which in the last legislature has been five: 52 for Botànic (PSPV, Compromís and Unides Podem) and 47 for the right (PP, Ciudadanos and Vox).
With a technical draw between the two blocks at the beginning of the electoral game, and despite the declarations of leaders of the PSPV and the PP that they aspire to govern alone, the challenge is to be able to add at least 50 seats, the figure that represents the absolute majority in Les Cortes.
On the left, they are waiting for Podemos, which will finally reissue the coalition with Esquerra Unida, to reach the 5% vote that guarantees entry into Les Corts, and how Yolanda Díaz’s Sumar project can influence. On the right, since the disappearance of Ciudadanos is taken for granted, PP and Vox would be condemned to understand each other.
The last seat of each province
One of the singularities of these regional elections in which, according to the demoscopic analysis, it starts from a technical tie is that the last seat of each of the three provinces of the Community will be crucial to determine the overall result, since a handful of votes can change the holder of a seat and tip the balance towards one or the other bloc.
You just have to look at the data from the ‘remnants’ of 2019: in Alicante, the PP was left 3,643 votes short of winning the last seat (which went to the PSPV), in Valencia it was 1,397 ballots short of winning the last seat (also from the PSPV) and in Castellón it lacked 390 votes (which went to Compromís). If those three deputies had gone to the PP, the right would have added 50 seats, the absolute majority.
Of the 99 parliamentarians in the Valencian chamber, the province that elects the most deputies is Valencia, with 40 – one of the keys that explains that on this occasion, unlike the two previous ones, the president of the Generalitat and candidate for re-election for the PSPV, Ximo Puig, has chosen to head the list for this constituency-, followed by Alicante (35) and Castellón (24).
The duo that doesn’t always work as such
On the last Sunday of May, citizens will find two ballot boxes when they go to the polling stations: one to elect their mayor or mayoress for the next four years, and another in which they will determine who will be the president of the Generalitat, just as happened eight years ago but not four years ago, when regional and general elections coincided.
The issue is that the vote for mayor seems to be done more in terms of person than acronym, and in the regional vote they carry the acronym of the party, which means that the two ballots are not always from the same party and leaves gaps in the percentage of support when counting each ballot box.
Fishing in the fishing ground for Cs votes
With the party in full disintegration, Ciudadanos arrives at these elections with some electoral projections that predict its disappearance from Les Corts and a testimonial presence at the municipal level, which will make both the PP -the party from which many of the orange militants came – Like the PSPV-PSOE they dispute the voter of the political center.
The 470,676 votes that Ciudadanos obtained in the 2019 regional elections and which translated into 18 seats in Les Corts, or the 248,823 that it gathered in the municipal elections four years ago, are now viewed greedily by the two big parties, who expect fish in that fishing ground through winks and even signings of people from the orange formation.
The jewels in the crown in these elections
Many eyes throughout Spain are on the Valencian Community, considering that the current open scenario could translate into an electoral turnaround after two left-wing government legislatures, but also in a city: Valencia, where, together with Barcelona and Seville, it is estimated that there may be a change of government.
Valencia is therefore one of the ‘jewels in the crown’ in these municipal elections, in which the big parties are going to turn: the PP with the aim of recovering the government of the third city in Spain where Rita Barberá was at the helm for 24 years, and the PSPV-PSOE to give Compromís a surprise and be able to raise the command rod.
