Vox abolishes mandatory appointments in Spanish public services

Vox abolishes mandatory appointments: back to the queue or the end of collapse?

Appoint or queue? This is the question Vox has placed at the center of public administration. The party is pushing to abolish mandatory appointments in state agencies: walk-in services would be offered to anyone showing up without an appointment, joining the queue as a complement to the current system. The measure sounds modest, but it has peine an uncomfortable debate about how public services are organized and, by extension, what voting is actually for.

Appointments were meant to save queues but ended up rationing access

The original argument was impeccable: citizens stop wasting their morning and arrive at the counter with a scheduled time. In practice, daily appointment limits have turned the system into a barrier. Examples circulate like knives: offices issuing only 20 appointments a day, procedures taking half an hour per person with just two desks. The result is spending a whole month checking the website early in the morning just to get permission to be heard. We went from a fishmonger’s slip of paper to a digital ordeal.

Some recall that the system did not originate during the pandemic. The SEPE (Spanish Public Employment Service) already used mandatory appointments before ELbichito and face masks. So nostalgia for spontaneous queues has an expiration date: in many agencies, walk-in service only truly existed until 2020; after that, mandatory scheduling was used to restrict access.

Bots, verification, and the curious business of slots

The collapse of appointment systems does not affect everyone equally. Intermediaries use automated programs to hoard appointments for sensitive procedures, exploiting the fact that public portals do not even incorporate basic human verification. Some propose digital personal identification, untransferable and linked to electronic ID, certificates, or Cl@ve, as already done with Tax Agency (Hacienda). This key, combined with external auditing of the appointment system, would achieve more than any rhetoric about civil servant laziness.

Voting is useless: the underlying skepticism

The Pyrrhic satisfaction from the announcement quickly turns into a deeper question: if voting achieves anything, why is the simple return to walk-in service applauded as a victory? While some argue the measure proves citizen pressure works, others contend the problem is structural and that parties, including the one proposing this, only make cosmetic changes. Disillusionment with Agenda 2030, million-euro fines from the ELbichito era, and the feeling that all governments play by the same rules have taken their toll. For a skeptical current, voting is not a tool for change but a ritual legitimizing the system that creates these obstacles.

The middle ground no one wants to discuss

Between a pure return to queues and the dictatorship of schedules, there is a middle ground gaining supporters: keeping appointments for procedures requiring documents and analysis, and reserving a daily quota of walk-in service for emergencies and urgent tasks. In other words, combining predictability with flexibility. The proposal on the table has an obvious political advantage: it requires hiring no one. And an equally clear disadvantage: without more civil servants, the only thing that changes is that waiting moves from the screen to the door.

With this landscape, some already nostalgically await the return of numbered paper slips. Things used to be done that way, and time, that great judge, will decide whether the Spanish administration is ready to solve the problem instead of just changing its entry point. Meanwhile, the longest queue remains the one for common sense.