Madrid
Updated:
Save
The change of the election law for one that allows greater proportionality in the results is one of the obsessions of citizens (Cs) since it was first introduced to some general electionsback in 2015. It has never had support in the Congress to carry out a reform of the Organic Law of the General Electoral Regime (Loreg), but does not lose its tenacity. This time, he proposes an ambitious regulation that replaces the D’Hondt systemreviled by the parties that emerged as a response to bipartisanship, by the Hare fee.
In the midst of the Andalusian election campaign and during a debate in Congress to definitively end the requested votedeputy Juan Ignacio Lopez-Bas has announced the bill registered by his group this Thursday.
The initiative, which he presents together with Edmund Ball Y Jose Maria Espejo-Saavedraconsists of thirty pages in which Cs proposes a series of modifications to the current electoral law, among which the new distribution of deputies by province and the new system to calculate the number of seats that correspond to each party stand out.
Liberal party sources consulted by ABC above all defend the greater proportionality that this law would allow, compared to the D’Hondt method, in which there is a great difference between the votes needed by one party and another to win a seat. In the elections of 10-Nin 2019, for example, Cs needed 163,774 ballots for each of its ten deputies for the 56,285 that were enough for the PSOE for each of its 120 seats in the lower house.
If the current electoral law establishes in its article 162 that each province must have a minimum of two deputies and the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, one each, Cs reduces the minimum number for the provinces also to one. In their text, the Liberals maintain that the remaining 298 deputies -before 248- be distributed by their population weight. The most substantial modification is that of the following article, 163, in which the liberals replace the D’Hondt law with the Hare quota, based on a system invented by the German mathematician Niemeyer.
If the Hare quota is applied to the November 2019 elections, the distribution of seats would have been as follows: PSOE, 100; PP82; vox57; United We Can (including In Comú Podem), 49; Citizens, 17; CKD12; together7; GNP6; EH Bildu5; cup3; More Countrytwo; compromisetwo; Canarian Coalitiontwo; BNGtwo; Navarre Sumtwo; PRC, 1; Y Teruel exists, 1. With this system, then, a significant loss of seats is observed in the two main parties, PSOE (-20) and PP (-7), from which the other three national parties with five more seats benefit above all. for Vox, fourteen more for United We Can and seven more for Cs. In the rest of the matches there are hardly any variations: ERC and Junts lose one, and the CUP, Compromís and BNG win one.
But the greater proportionality is reflected above all in the number of votes needed by national parties to win seats. If with D’Hondt the PSOE and the PP required just over 56,000 votes, Vox more than 70,000, United We Can more than 91,000 and Cs more than 163,000, with Hare the balance is balanced: the PSOE would have needed 67,542 votes per seat , the PP 61,229, Vox 63,867, United We Can 62,232 and Cs 96,337.
other changes
In his law, Cs retains the current cutoff of the three per cent of the vote in each district to opt for representation, but waives the bet of Albert Rivera for also imposing a cut of three percent of the vote at the national level. That idea was promoted in its day by the difficulty of the nationalist parties in reaching that barrier, which would greatly complicate their access to Congress, but without reaching the extreme of outlawing them as Vox proposes. Now, in a delicate moment of Cs, in which he fights for his own survival, he ‘forgets’ that modification.
The one that it does include in its bill is to legislatively shield the celebration of, at least, two debates during the election campaign. Both should be broadcast on public television with national coverage and at a minimum -no set maximum- candidates from all parties with own parliamentary group in the lower house. The Liberals also intend to add to the causes of ineligibility to be on the run from the Justicein a clear desire to avoid a repetition of what happened with Carles Puigdemont and some of his former advisers. The proposal of Cs, the umpteenth in electoral matters, has few signs of prospering due to the refusal of bipartisanship, especially the PSOE, to modify the matter.
www.abc.es
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism