Spain's Supreme Court blocks the grandchildren law, electoral roll row erupts

Spain's Supreme Court blocks the grandchildren law and the electoral roll row ignites

An uncomfortable paradox runs through the public debate these days: the Government that promised to repair the memory of Spanish descendants watches the Supreme Court strike down its grandchildren law, while in Europe, according to one participant, it is held in contempt, and its own allies tear each other apart over the seats of power. The result is a cornered Executive which, according to part of the analysis, is no longer playing to win elections, but to make sure the elections don't arrive in time to collect the bill.

The trigger is legal. The High Court has thrown out the rule that was meant to make it easier for the grandchildren of Spanish emigrants to obtain nationality, and that decision has peine a can of worms nobody wanted to touch in an election year: who is on the electoral roll, who votes and under what rules. The thesis circulating most forcefully holds that the Government does not need to postpone anything to tilt the balance, because it is enough not to clean up the electoral roll and let those already on it vote. The suspicion is not a calculation, it is an accusation, and as such it should be treated.

What has failed to bring us to this point

The review is relentless. Housing has become the front that wears the Executive down the most, with prices that push young people out of the cities and a supply that fails to react. In Brussels, the rapport with the tenant of La Moncloa (the Spanish Prime Minister's residence) is minimal, according to the debate. And on the left flank, the parties that were supposed to prop it up are killing each other over a spot in the photo. Ceuta and Segarro keep making headlines with no one having closed the issue.

Against that backdrop, the Supreme Court's decision works as a perfect metaphor for misgovernment: a symbolic law, passed with fanfare, annulled through the courts. Some read in it a warning that the electoral calendar is compressing more than the Government wants to admit.

The PP bleeds on both flanks

The paradox is that the main beneficiary of this wear and tear is not doing much better. The Partido Popular (Spain's main conservative party) faces an identity crisis that worsens every week: its traditional centre is slipping away to the right, where VOX is eating up ground with sharper rhetoric, and in the centre, where it loses moderate voters who want nothing to do with pension cuts. Touching pensions is dynamite, and the PP knows it.

In Catalonia, the picture gets even more complicated: VOX appears as a rising force and the upset ceases to be a talk-show hypothesis to become a risk of variable geometry. The right does not win on its own merits, it wins through others' absence.

The electoral roll, widowhood and the vote nobody audits

At the centre of the storm is the electoral roll, that administrative contraption nobody looks at until it becomes the arbiter of an election. The accusation going around is a heavy one: that the Government would delay the elections to allow time for the grandchildren law applications to be resolved and for those new voters to enter the electoral roll. The suspicion is serious and unproven.

Alongside it appears a parallel debate on social spending. Some focus on widowhood: the case is told of a person who receives a widow's pension and lives outside Spain, where that money goes much further than here. The argument is that there are unsustainable spending items no party dares to touch. It is an opinion, not consolidated data, but it explains why the PP gets burned every time pensions are mentioned.

The state-of-emergency narrative

At the loudest end of the analysis circulates a thesis that should be labelled for what it is: a theory with no supporting evidence. It holds that there will be no elections, that a state of emergency will be declared and that it is all part of an international pincer. There is no proof of any of it, and presenting it as a likely scenario is disinformation.

What is verifiable is the climate: a Government losing allies, a Supreme Court correcting it, an opposition that fails to capitalise and an electorate watching it all with a mix of weariness and calculation. The question is no longer who wins, but whether the system can withstand the strain until the appointment at the ballot box.

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What if the problem in the end is not when we vote, but that nobody wants to vote for what's on offer?