Spain’s two main opposition parties have accused Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of engineering a wave of naturalisations to reshape the electorate in his favour.
The centre-right Partido Popular (PP) and the right-wing Vox have both cast the so-called ‘Grandchildren’s Law’ as a bid to manipulate the electoral roll before the next general election.
The law, a clause of the 2022 Democratic Memory Law, grants Spanish nationality to descendants of exiles and emigrants. The window to apply closed in October 2025.
The opposition says the scheme is being used to manufacture new voters. Naturalised citizens, unlike foreign residents, are entitled to vote in Spanish elections.
The charge was sharpened on June 29 by PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijoo, who said the current electorate no longer added up for Sánchez. In a radio interview, he summed up the Prime Minister’s supposed logic: “Let’s see if manufacturing voters makes the numbers add up.”
Feijoo put pending applications at 2.6 million and said up to 2.5 million people could gain voting rights within around 18 months. He called the process ‘electoral engineering’.
Vox leader Santiago Abascal had made the same case in Congress on June 24. He told the chamber that Sánchez was acting “to steal the elections in Spain”.
Abascal accused the government of handing passports to people who had never lived in the country. He warned of votes cast abroad with no electoral monitors or custody of ballots.
At the heart of the complaint is the way new citizens register. They may choose the municipality where they vote, the parties say, allowing ballots to be steered into small, closely fought constituencies.
Both have pointed to Argentina, where the opposition says hundreds of thousands of applications are concentrated, with some 640,000 in Buenos Aires alone.
Argentina already holds the largest bloc of registered Spanish voters abroad, ahead of France and the United States, according to national statistics. Those totals have grown with the naturalisations.
More than half a million applications have already been granted, the opposition says, with naturalised descendants having voted in recent regional elections, including in Andalusia.
The PP said it would study tighter nationality requirements if it took office. Vox has pressed a separate legal challenge to scrutinise the electoral rolls.
The Spanish Government has defended the law as a way to restore nationality to descendants of those who fled the Franco dictatorship or emigrated for economic reasons. It has rejected the opposition’s accusations of electoral manipulation.
The opposition has linked the naturalisation drive to opinion polls that point to defeat for Sánchez’s Socialists at the next general election.
Recent surveys have placed Vox at record highs and the combined Spanish right close to a parliamentary majority.
