What a desire to argue!”, my mother would say watching the debates organized by our politicians. All by themselves. When it’s not one, it’s the other. What a desire to argue, it’s true. And all for nothing. You see, Feijóo is insisting that Pedro Sánchez is going to grant nationality to millions of people to win the elections again. He called it “electoral engineering” because he doesn’t want to talk about “fraud.” The fascinating thing is that he hasn’t gotten a migraine.
I confess my astonishment when, given the current scandalous situation surrounding Sánchez and the PSOE, the leader of the main opposition party is getting involved in a matter that concerns the average Spaniard very little. Especially since naturalizations by ancestry have been quite common over the years and no one, not even the PP, has discussed them. Feijóo supported them not long ago.
Those who are more occupied than concerned about the matter are the leaders of VOX, who have seen their great potential to make “noise,” which is what brings them rewards. Don’t be fooled, it’s nothing else. Here the “ultra-smart” maintain their strategy of continuing to make noise about everything that comes from outside. It costs them very little electorally because 90% of their voters are in Spain.
Is the same true for the People’s Party? Considering that their electoral bases are in the moderate center-right, any stridency is counterproductive. The question is that if they join the fight against naturalizations, they give reason to the ultras. If they don’t join, they have to work hard to justify that they are not supporting Pedro Sánchez’s Government. In summary, whatever they do, they lose votes or don’t gain them, which is basically the same, and let VOX take the credit with their own electorate.
And that is a serious problem for the PP, which has been teetering on the tightrope of seeking votes in the center or the far right for too long. If they can’t find them, it’s simply because you can’t convince moderates and extremists at the same time. VOX knows this and so does the PSOE.
The one who doesn’t seem to know it is Feijóo, or he hides it very well. And that is also concerning. I remember that the “to know or not to know” was one of the great syllogisms used against Felipe González when the GAL issue was uncovered, not to mention the current criticisms of Sánchez. If he doesn’t understand anything, he is not fit to preside over a Government. And if he does know, he is pulling our leg and that doesn’t work for us. In both cases, he should resign.
Of course, stopping saying inconsistencies also helps. Saying that Sánchez’s Government intends to modify the census by granting nationality to two and a half million people in the next 18 months is, at the very least, a reason to go back to math class as soon as possible, Mr. Feijóo.
Let’s go with the data that the president of the Association of Spanish Diplomats (ADE), Alberto Virella, told me this week, and you will understand why.
Until October 23, 2025, 2.4 million applications were accepted. Of these, the Consulate that received the most applications was Buenos Aires: 645,000.
Now comes the interesting part: those 645,000 applications for nationality received at the Buenos Aires Consulate due to the misnamed ‘Law of Grandchildren’ —which is part of the Democratic Memory Law of 2022— are almost 11 times more than the 60,000 requests submitted to the same Consulate in 2007 (this time due to the Historical Memory Law).
Do you know how long it took to process the 60,000 applications from 2007? Thirteen (13) years!, Virella recalls. Now we just need to do a simple multiplication. If 60,000 applications were processed in 13 years, the current 645,000 could be processed in the next… 135 years! In round numbers, of course.
In case anyone is thinking, “Of course, the lazy foreign service officials!”, I suggest doing more numbers. If a year has an average of 250 working days, the consular officials —we’re only talking about Buenos Aires— managed an average of 20 cases daily in 2007.
Now add other consular procedures: passports, visas, apostilles, certificates, notarial procedures, civil registries (births, marriages, deaths), registration and assistance to transients, among other daily tasks. No, they have not dedicated themselves to ‘dolce far niente.’
And subtract the number of officials assigned to our consulates abroad: the same as at the beginning of the century. In 25 years, the staff of consular agents has hardly increased. And whatever Minister Albares says about the implementation of the Unified Consular Processing Desk, this system still does not help to lighten the workload of officials.
Here is where we have the problem, in the chronic shortage of personnel that our administration presents abroad and not in the fact that granting citizenship to descendants of Spaniards could change electoral results. But surely the ‘popular’ strategists think it is more profitable to continue raising noisy but useless controversies. Moreover, if they advocate increasing staff, who guarantees them that they won’t be criticized for not increasing it if they govern?
So we have ten times more requests with the same number of officials and an 18-month time limit for Pedro Sánchez to win the 2027 elections thanks to “naturalizing socialists,” as the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has said. Impressive, this woman.
By the way, especially for the Madrid president, some clarifications: 1) the application does not imply having received the necessary documents to open the cases; 2) the receipt of the cases does not imply their approval; 3) Once nationality is granted, the applicant is assigned a Spanish province according to their roots or those of their ancestors, not by chance.
And that leads us to the fact that there is also no possibility of “electoral engineering” by fabricating voters to “fill” one or several provinces with socialists.
I fear that Sánchez will not be able to finish his bold plan to win votes abroad, no.
As I told you at the beginning, it is curious the PP’s insistence on jumping on the VOX bandwagon, when it should be the other way around. I agree that Feijóo will need to negotiate with the “ultras,” but that is already taken into account and, when the time comes, he will have to make as many concessions as Abascal to him. However, the opposite is happening. Is Feijóo more desperate than Abascal? It seems so. But, who has more votes? And more seats? The perception of Spaniards is that VOX is taking the initiative and the PP is a weak, inconsistent party with no ideas. And that’s not how you win elections.
Just as Puigdemont has governed from Waterloo with Pedro Sánchez, Abascal could do the same, and without leaving Madrid. Wait, I just thought that maybe Feijóo is adopting a new political tactic: “let’s focus on losing the elections to win the Government.” That makes more sense, you see.
