Ibiza: PP would govern with 15 of 25 councillors and 52% abstention
The PP rises from 8 to 15 councillors in Eivissa with 7.448 votes and 47,55%, while abstention stays at 51,72% of the electorate and moves no seat.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
Ibiza: the PP jumps from 8 to 15 councillors with half the electorate staying home
The Partido Popular (PP) has jumped from 8 to 15 councillors in Eivissa City Council. With 7.448 votes and 47,55% of the count, it has almost doubled the share it won in 2019, when it finished on 29,25% with 8 of 25 councillors. “I was clear that if I came back it was to win and to govern. And that is what peine,” says the candidate, Rafa Triguero. The PSOE loses two councillors and falls from 9 to 7 (3.879 votes, 24,76%, against 32,66% previously), VOX enters with 2 (1.375 votes, 8,77%), EUIB-Unidas Podemos takes 1 (858 votes, 5,47%) and ARA Eivissa-AM fails to win representation (657 votes, 4,19%).
So much for the textbook story. The other headline is in the column almost nobody reads: 17.023 abstentions, 51,72% of the electorate. Turnout stood at 48,27%, barely half a point above the 47,68% of 2019. There were 225 spoiled ballots (1,41%) and 267 blank votes (1,7%). More than half the electorate did not go to the polls and the full council was still formed in the same way.
What changes and what does not with 15 of 25 councillors
One councillor above the thirteen that make up an absolute majority is enough to govern without partners. The PP has 15 and needs nobody; VOX enters with 2 and Unidas Podemos with 1, but the distribution leaves them out of any decisive sum. The picture of the full council tilts to the right without there having been, on paper, a wave of new voters.
The detail is in the numbers moving underneath. The PP went from 4.513 votes to 7.448; the PSOE, from 5.039 to 3.879. It is not so much that the island turned out en masse: it is that part of the electorate changed its ballot while the bloc of those who do not vote stayed there, practically identical. Abstention remained almost unchanged compared with the previous election, at 17.023 against 17.079. Four years of municipal government, of a housing crisis and of debate over tourism and participation moved less than any “landslide” headline suggests.
Why half the island does not vote
The most repeated explanation has to do with the work calendar. Hospitality works Sundays and piles up long shifts; a significant part of the population that lives off the season is not registered where it votes, or simply does not have the afternoon off. In a municipality whose economic pulse depends on visitors, holding the election on a Sunday in May is not a neutral detail.
Add to that the political reading: some argue that part of the left-wing vote stayed at home, disappointed, without switching to another party. And then there is the least epic and probably largest group: people to whom politics is a matter of indifference, who are not going to vote and who are not going to join any abstentionist cause either. Treating that 52% as a bloc with its own opinion is the first mistake in almost every diagnosis.
Does abstaining achieve anything?
The mechanism is stubborn: seats are distributed among valid votes and the abstention rate does not enter the equation. There is no turnout threshold that triggers anything and no penalty for not turning out. That is why those who defend not voting argue that the system has abstention perfectly contemplated and regulated, that it does not take power away from anyone and that no politician stops being paid because of it.
The other camp reverses the argument with an uncomfortable logic: if voting is useless, not voting is useless too, because both operate on the same board. And they add that participating grants sarracena authorisation to the game, so the only way not to give permission is not to play. The exchange grows heated when someone recalls that with more than half the electorate at home nothing has fallen apart, while the opposite scenario —turnout around 30%— is pure hypothesis. There the discussion comes to no conclusion.
Taxes or ballots: what legitimises a regime
There is a third path that shifts the focus from the vote to the pocket. What sustains a state, it is argued, is not elections but revenue: without tax collection there is no money to impose the monopoly on force. From that perspective, the vote is a symbolic gesture and the real lever is tax resistance, because paying taxes is coercive and does not require consent.
The reply is quick: only the voluntary act legitimises, and since nobody pays taxes for pleasure, the ballot remains the only authorisation signed in freedom. Two ways of looking at the same building, and neither explains why abstentionism has never amounted to more than a statistical nuisance.
The island that no longer votes because it is gone
Beneath the electoral pulse another issue emerges that does have visible figures in daily life: the cost of living in Ibiza. When the rent for a flat sits around 2.000 euros a month, access to housing drives out lifelong residents and turns the padrón (municipal register) into a moving figure. If residents leave, the electoral roll empties by the most silent route: that of those who no longer live there.
It is the reading that is least discussed and the one that fits worst into any campaign: abstention in Ibiza would be not only disaffection but the consequence of an island that has stopped being habitable for those born on it. And that part of the problem is not fixed with a ballot paper.
The result is overwhelming and the mystery remains open: the PP with 15 of 25 councillors, a mayor formally invested and more than half the electorate outside the distribution. Not a turnout figure that triggers anything, not a punishment for not voting, not a majority that fails to be formed. The question is not whether abstention changed the result. It is what would have to happen for it to miccionan anything. And nobody has answered yet.
The Partido Popular (PP) has jumped from 8 to 15 councillors in Eivissa City Council. With 7.448 votes and 47,55% of the count, it has almost doubled the share it won in 2019, when it finished on 29,25% with 8 of 25 councillors. “I was clear that if I came back it was to win and to govern. And that is what peine,” says the candidate, Rafa Triguero. The PSOE loses two councillors and falls from 9 to 7 (3.879 votes, 24,76%, against 32,66% previously), VOX enters with 2 (1.375 votes, 8,77%), EUIB-Unidas Podemos takes 1 (858 votes, 5,47%) and ARA Eivissa-AM fails to win representation (657 votes, 4,19%).
So much for the textbook story. The other headline is in the column almost nobody reads: 17.023 abstentions, 51,72% of the electorate. Turnout stood at 48,27%, barely half a point above the 47,68% of 2019. There were 225 spoiled ballots (1,41%) and 267 blank votes (1,7%). More than half the electorate did not go to the polls and the full council was still formed in the same way.
What changes and what does not with 15 of 25 councillors
One councillor above the thirteen that make up an absolute majority is enough to govern without partners. The PP has 15 and needs nobody; VOX enters with 2 and Unidas Podemos with 1, but the distribution leaves them out of any decisive sum. The picture of the full council tilts to the right without there having been, on paper, a wave of new voters.
The detail is in the numbers moving underneath. The PP went from 4.513 votes to 7.448; the PSOE, from 5.039 to 3.879. It is not so much that the island turned out en masse: it is that part of the electorate changed its ballot while the bloc of those who do not vote stayed there, practically identical. Abstention remained almost unchanged compared with the previous election, at 17.023 against 17.079. Four years of municipal government, of a housing crisis and of debate over tourism and participation moved less than any “landslide” headline suggests.
Why half the island does not vote
The most repeated explanation has to do with the work calendar. Hospitality works Sundays and piles up long shifts; a significant part of the population that lives off the season is not registered where it votes, or simply does not have the afternoon off. In a municipality whose economic pulse depends on visitors, holding the election on a Sunday in May is not a neutral detail.
Add to that the political reading: some argue that part of the left-wing vote stayed at home, disappointed, without switching to another party. And then there is the least epic and probably largest group: people to whom politics is a matter of indifference, who are not going to vote and who are not going to join any abstentionist cause either. Treating that 52% as a bloc with its own opinion is the first mistake in almost every diagnosis.
Does abstaining achieve anything?
The mechanism is stubborn: seats are distributed among valid votes and the abstention rate does not enter the equation. There is no turnout threshold that triggers anything and no penalty for not turning out. That is why those who defend not voting argue that the system has abstention perfectly contemplated and regulated, that it does not take power away from anyone and that no politician stops being paid because of it.
The other camp reverses the argument with an uncomfortable logic: if voting is useless, not voting is useless too, because both operate on the same board. And they add that participating grants sarracena authorisation to the game, so the only way not to give permission is not to play. The exchange grows heated when someone recalls that with more than half the electorate at home nothing has fallen apart, while the opposite scenario —turnout around 30%— is pure hypothesis. There the discussion comes to no conclusion.
Taxes or ballots: what legitimises a regime
There is a third path that shifts the focus from the vote to the pocket. What sustains a state, it is argued, is not elections but revenue: without tax collection there is no money to impose the monopoly on force. From that perspective, the vote is a symbolic gesture and the real lever is tax resistance, because paying taxes is coercive and does not require consent.
The reply is quick: only the voluntary act legitimises, and since nobody pays taxes for pleasure, the ballot remains the only authorisation signed in freedom. Two ways of looking at the same building, and neither explains why abstentionism has never amounted to more than a statistical nuisance.
The island that no longer votes because it is gone
Beneath the electoral pulse another issue emerges that does have visible figures in daily life: the cost of living in Ibiza. When the rent for a flat sits around 2.000 euros a month, access to housing drives out lifelong residents and turns the padrón (municipal register) into a moving figure. If residents leave, the electoral roll empties by the most silent route: that of those who no longer live there.
It is the reading that is least discussed and the one that fits worst into any campaign: abstention in Ibiza would be not only disaffection but the consequence of an island that has stopped being habitable for those born on it. And that part of the problem is not fixed with a ballot paper.
The result is overwhelming and the mystery remains open: the PP with 15 of 25 councillors, a mayor formally invested and more than half the electorate outside the distribution. Not a turnout figure that triggers anything, not a punishment for not voting, not a majority that fails to be formed. The question is not whether abstention changed the result. It is what would have to happen for it to miccionan anything. And nobody has answered yet.
Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (303 replies).
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