One of the downsides of Brexit – as far as the millions of
Europeans who live in the wrong place (Britons in the EU-27 or the
legions of EU-27 people living in the UK) are concerned – is the
lack of information about their future.
It’s almost as if
no one cares.
Which, of course,
they don’t.
The European Union
was always more about trade opportunity than displaced citizens’
rights. And nowhere is this more obvious than in our supposed (and
somewhat modest) political privileges. Indeed, it’s hard to even
plan for power and influence when you don’t know how many people
are going to participate in elections and are in doubt as to how they
might vote.
This was the
conundrum that faced Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba back in 1995 when his
president Felipe Gonzalez, observing a small but significant change
in the Constitution made in 1992, decreed that the Europeans living
in Spain would be able to vote in European and municipal elections
that same year. Rubalcaba, the Minister of Presidential Affairs (the
man who much later substituted our residence cards for the handy A4 police
letter and passport combo), was appalled. God only knew how they
might vote, he thought, allowing the European residents to go ahead
in the European elections (after all, you are voting for people who
represent Spanish interests in Brussels) but stopping the municipal
vote until the next one occurred in 1999.
The constitutional
change of 1992 was interesting, as it gave European residents (who
now had to register along with their inscription on the town registry
– the padrón – their separate plea to vote), not only the
active right, but the passive one also (or, in English,
that they could now join or even lead a local political list).
Some of us
eventually did, and Rubalcaba will have been pleased, four years
after his mischief, to note that we voted locally, for local
candidates and, in short, behaved ourselves.
In fact, most of us
didn’t vote at all, and even today, there is only a modest number
of foreign councillors scattered across Spain, in local government or
in the opposition, together with just one foreign mayor, Belgian-born
Mario Blancke in Alcaucín, Málaga. Many of these councillors are
stretched along the coast in (
forgive us) small and
insignificant towns, are thirty-seven
of
these are British. Proportionally speaking, the foreign residents are woefully under-represented.
So, what would
happen if Brexit caused those British councillors along with all
other British residents in Spain to become disenfranchised as is the
current
scenario from the Spanish electoral commission (‘when and if
the UK implements Brexit, their nationals, resident in Spain, will
lose their right to vote’)?
Firstly, candidacies
from other EU residents, Mario Blancke as one example, would lose way
with less ‘foreigners’ voting for their lists. Secondly, town
halls, like any other political agency, would take less notice of a
population that had no suffrage, and thirdly, the British residents
themselves would be returned to that old position of ‘no taxation
without representation’ (an ugly place to be, currently suffered by
many other foreign nationals living in Spain).
Spain indeed has
bilateral agreements with some
third
countries. Norway from the beginning, later followed by Iceland
and a few South American countries along with New Zealand, South
Korea and (of course) Trinidad and Tobago (22 of them live in Spain as residents!). Citizens from these
countries may vote, but not present themselves as candidates on electoral lists.
An
article
in
El País this weekend changed the game-plan. It said that
the British and Spanish authorities were discussing an eleventh-hour
agreement to give their guests rights to vote, active and passive
rights. ‘The Government hopes that the bilateral agreement would be
applied already in the municipal elections of May 26th’. In this
agreeable situation, we could maintain our vote in local elections,
even if we were to lose it in the European ones – a small loss as
things stand. However, in a caveat which would please Rubalcaba, we
read
‘...Once it is signed, the deal will be in the same category as any
other international treaty and will require ratification by the
Spanish and British parliaments. This will probably not happen in
time for the May 26 elections next year, diplomatic sources have
admitted. In order to work around this problem, the Spanish Foreign
Ministry is considering the option of making the agreement go
provisionally into force as soon as it is signed by both
governments...’. Perhaps, if they had started this conversation two years ago, instead of last week...
Maybe (just maybe)
the UK will stay in the EU – either a postponement of their
departure or a second referendum with a happier end (hello,
Westminster, it would be nice if we were invited to vote in such an
important plebiscite this time).
This (apparently,
hopefully, maybe, possibly) being the case, we foreign residents will
still need to register to vote – by asking for the
hoja
de inscripción del voto – in our local town halls, before
January 15th (or December 31st if you are not from the EU).
Would there still be
time to revise our candidate lists for next May, in the event we keep
our vote?
Barely.
