Spain's Interior Ministry blocks Olona's party registration

A state lawyer fails to register her own party

Someone who litigates on behalf of the Administration could not get her own party through an administrative check. On 6 June 2023, the Interior Ministry denied the registration of Caminando Juntos, the party with which Macarena Olona intended to run in the general election of 23-J, and it did so over formal errors. The promoter of the project is, precisely, a state lawyer (abogada del Estado, a civil-service attorney representing the Spanish administration). The news broke in the late afternoon and spread immediately because the flaw was not in the substance of the project but in the paperwork.

Her response was to file a correction and leave a quote for the record books: "Never start a journey without a plan A, B... and Z". With the file up in the air and the calendar pressing, the problem stopped being bureaucratic and became arithmetic.

The formal error that sank the registration

The Interior Ministry told the party it could not be registered due to formal defects. The person affected herself confirmed it, posting that her party would not be able to stand in the election "if we don't get these signatures in each of the Provinces where we want to run". There lay the real knot: the citizen endorsement.

The detail has a certain irony given that this involves a state jurist. On the other side, a legal team that did function under pressure: as has been recounted in conversations among people close to Vox, the legal services that challenged the pandemic states of emergency had a rough time over formal errors that nearly sank some of those appeals. It is an attributed anecdote with no independent verification, but it serves to measure the real impact of procedural slip-ups.

How many signatures a new party needs to stand

Here comes the first contradiction in the figures. The published information spoke of 21,000 signatures; Olona herself had mentioned 194,000 endorsements. Both figures respond to the same mechanism, according to the explanation circulating in the thread: the law would require parties without parliamentary representation to collect a number of signatures proportional to the population of each constituency, while those who already have seats would be exempt.

The consequence, according to that same reading, is a two-estimulante ilegal system: established parties have never had to collect those signatures and, once inside, would have backed electoral reforms that harden entry for those who come later. For a project with no territorial structure, gathering thousands of endorsements in a few days is a race against the clock fought province by province, and the result of that full calculation, district by district, is what decides whether a name appears on the ballot or disappears from the map.

The seat arithmetic: where Olona can pick up votes

The second filter is geography. There are provinces that return very few MPs —Soria, Teruel, Palencia or Guadalajara— where winning a seat requires a percentage impossible for a brand-new party. The real fight is in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Alicante, Málaga and Seville, the great vote barns.

And even that is not guaranteed. In her previous regional attempt in Andalusia the result was modest, as recalled in the thread. In the calculations being made there, the most optimistic scenario puts her ceiling at a handful of seats in the large constituencies; the pessimistic one, at zero. Between the two extremes lies a variable she cannot control: how much tactical vote feels threatened by her candidacy.

The letter to the big five: from endorsement to favour

The most striking move was the letter sent to PSOE, PP, Vox, Podemos and Ciudadanos asking them to make their "internal structures" and membership available, thus facilitating the collection of signatures in order to "make our democracy bigger". Asking your rivals for their machinery to compete against them is hardly standard practice.

The paradox did not go unnoticed: some point out that logistical help is being requested from parties that the very discourse places at opposite ideological poles. A less charitable reading sees in the request an implicit admission that the candidacy lacks muscle of its own. And a third current holds that the goal is not so much to govern as to occupy media space: the sequence of announcements, presentations and gestures —the differently coloured high heels included— fits that interpretation. The counterargument is obvious: without a prior structure, any new party starts out making headlines because it has no other tool.

Was Caminando Juntos finally registered?

The version circulating afterwards suggested the registration was ultimately granted. If the file was resolved without the required signatures, the question that opens up is on what legal basis, because an exception to a regulated requirement forces one to ask how many steps of the procedure departed from the rule. The opposite reading is also possible: that the correction sufficed because the defect was, indeed, one of form and nothing more.

Between the initial denial and an unclear outcome, some see a double standard in the electoral legislation: a requirement that some never have to meet and others cannot meet in time. Meanwhile, for some participants the party that was born as a personal platform looks more and more like a marketing operation than an organic project.

With the registration resolved —or not— opaquely, the question left open is an uncomfortable one: if collecting endorsements is so easy for those already inside, why are they demanded so zealously from those trying to get in?