The Central Electoral Board (JEC) will meet urgently on Monday, September 14 at 12:30 p.m. to start as soon as possible the deadline given by the Supreme Court to obtain the key report on the grandchildren law, according to EL MUNDO through sources from the Board. With this acceleration, the final instruction of the JEC would be ready by October 9 at the latest. This move comes just after the Supreme Court agreed this Tuesday to suspend registrations in the Electoral Census of Absent Residents derived from the application of the grandchildren law. That is, the exercise of the right to vote for new registrants is suspended while appeals against the legal reform are resolved.
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Now the body that oversees electoral processes has 15 days to collect the data that the Electoral Census Office was not providing, despite having requested it two months ago. What data? Those related to how new naturalized citizens are assigned a municipality in which to vote, and the discrimination of which naturalized persons did so through the ordinary channel and which thanks to the Democratic Memory Law, which in a provision – called the grandchildren law – allows the children and grandchildren of exiles to be naturalized. The first of these aspects depends on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Now the Supreme Court requires that all documentation be delivered, no matter what, within 15 days. That is, by September 29, since the JEC meeting is moved up to the 14th. To this end, it “requires” the Electoral Census Office to “issue the appropriate instructions to the consular registries” to break down the information without further delay. Even if the consulates become overwhelmed, as the consulted sources already foresee. And then, the Electoral Board will have 10 days for the “approval of the corresponding instruction.” This sets the deadline for October 9.
What has happened to reach this point? The key is that the spirit of the rule was only to naturalize the children and grandchildren of exiles due to reprisals from the War and Francoism, but a 2022 instruction from the then Director General of Legal Security and Public Faith, then led by Sofía Puente, sister of the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, expanded the application of the rule to great-grandchildren and even great-great-grandchildren, and gave free rein.
It is worth explaining it once again, due to the unprecedented interpretation by Puente, which redid and expanded the scope of a law through an instruction. Puente interpreted that when the law says that those who can be naturalized are “those born outside Spain of a father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, who were originally Spanish, and who, as a consequence of having suffered exile…”, that “and who” means “and also those who”. As if they were two different groups of people, and not just one in which a series of requirements must be met.
But that is not what was voted on in Congress in any case. In fact, during the processing of the Democratic Memory Law, the majority of the Lower House expressly rejected an amendment from Ciudadanos that said exactly that, that anyone could recover nationality if they had left Spain.
This legal dispute raised the decibels of the political battle in Congress yesterday. Alberto Núñez Feijóo accused Pedro Sánchez of “not paying attention to the problems of citizens but only manipulating the electoral census, the judicial problems of his party, and the statements in the courts by the socialists” that could implicate him.
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