Some 2,708,083 people were registered on the overseas electoral roll, known by its Spanish initials CERA, on May 1, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE). The register has been growing by more than 16,000 names a month.
The roll has risen by about 375,000 since the July 2023 general election, an increase of 16 per cent. It could swell by a further 600,000 before the next national vote, due by 2027, taking it past 2.9 million.
That growth has been attributed largely to the 2022 Democratic Memory Law, which contains the provision widely known as the ley de nietos (grandchildren law). It grants Spanish nationality to the children and grandchildren of Spaniards who lost their citizenship after going into exile for political, ideological, religious or sexual-orientation reasons.
About 2.4 million people have begun the process, according to the foreign ministry. Once naturalised, a new citizen joins the roll and can vote in general, regional and European elections without ever having lived in Spain.
Each Spanish passport also confers European Union citizenship and the right to live and work anywhere in the bloc, the same concern several EU leaders raised over Madrid’s mass regularisation of migrants this year.
The pace marks a sharp break with the past. Between 2017 and 2021 the overseas roll grew by about 10 per cent, while in the current parliament it is on course to roughly double that rate, INE figures show.
CONSULATES OVERWHELMED
The applications have overwhelmed Spain’s consular network. José María Ridao, the consul general in Buenos Aires, has estimated it would take more than a century to clear the backlog in the Argentine capital alone.
To speed matters up, the Spanish Government has turned to outside contractors. The justice ministry awarded a €1.7 million contract to technology firm Neoris España to process nationality files, while the foreign ministry signed a separate deal worth €1,131,295 with Grupo Empresarial Palco, a Cuban state company, to supply staff to the consulate in Havana.
The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) has confirmed it would also draw on “external support”. César Mogo, the socialist senator responsible for the party abroad, told the General Council of Spanish Citizenship Abroad on May 26 that a deal was about to be signed with Ineco, a state-owned engineering company, to “speed up and overcome” the processing problems, though that arrangement has yet to appear in the official gazette.
Argentina alone accounts for 505,168 registered voters, or 18.8 per cent of the overseas roll. Most of the rest are concentrated in France, the United States, Mexico, Cuba, Germany and the United Kingdom. Together those countries hold close to 1.6 million eligible voters, more than 60 per cent of the total.
MADRID BY DEFAULT
In Madrid, the province that returns the most seats in parliament, the roll has grown by almost 28 per cent, from 379,961 to 486,223, an increase of more than 106,000 electors. New citizens who cannot prove a province of origin are assigned there by default, diplomatic sources told El Español.
The registration form lets applicants choose the municipality where they wish to vote, citing their last residence, their own ties or those of their ancestors. A fourth box, marked “other reasons”, allows an applicant to pick almost any constituency on grounds that are, in practice, impossible to verify, a flexibility the same sources said they found troubling.
TURNOUT RISES
Turnout among overseas voters remains low, at about 10 per cent, though it has climbed since the government abolished the voto rogado (requested vote), a system that obliged emigrants to apply for ballots in advance. Participation rose from just under 7 per cent in the 2019 general election to around 10 per cent in 2023.
The political effect is disputed. In recent regional elections in Andalusia, Castilla y León, Aragón and Extremadura, the centre-right Partido Popular (PP) won at home while the governing Socialists prevailed among voters abroad.
In opposition ranks, the suspicion has grown that the executive is quietly reshaping the roll with the next general election in mind. Right-wing critics have linked the naturalisation drive to the government’s separate regularisation of some 900,000 undocumented migrants, arguing that both enlarge the pool of EU citizens.
PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has accused the government of applying the law “improperly” and questioned what lay behind it. Right-wing Vox leader Santiago Abascal went further, alleging an attempt to alter the electoral roll for 2027 through mass naturalisations.
The government has not backed those claims. It has so far declined to tell parliament how many people have been naturalised under the law, which was presented as reparation for the descendants of those exiled under the Franco dictatorship.
