Last week, we voted in Parliament on the opinion of the Electoral Reform Study Commission; one of the key issues of this legislature.
In 1982, the drafters faced an Archipelago in which the political, economic and social weight was held by the capital islands. In their eagerness to build a land with development on all the islands, they were able to see the Canary Islands beyond the political moment they were experiencing.
They were able to debate and reflect on the possible development of the Archipelago, concluding that the system had to represent the different geographical realities of the islands, and for this purpose, the triple parity formula was used.
In 1993, Coalición Canaria was born and confronted the electoral system established prior to its birth, in which various parties such as the PSOE or Alianza Popular had already participated.
Coalición Canaria was the most voted party in the 1995 elections, as it was in 1999 and 2003. In the 2007 electoral period, there was a turning point; the PSOE is the party that obtains the highest number of votes after the nationalist trend.
What do I want to demonstrate with this data? Nothing more and nothing less than that with this same electoral system, the PSOE has also managed to be the most voted party.
So far, I have only talked about elections but not about the different governments that have governed in the Canary Islands; and Coalición Canaria has done so with the PSOE and PP in the different mandates.
I stop at this question because we have never had absolute majorities in the Canary Islands and that has meant that we have to make pacts. We are constantly accused of the fact that, despite not being the most voted force in some elections, we have governed. This is possible because the proportional system tends to generate multi-party systems and allows any political party that runs in the elections and obtains representation to govern, whether it is the party that has obtained the highest number of votes or the one that has obtained the fewest votes. And it is these votes that are transformed into political representatives.
For example, one party gets 10 political representatives and another gets 2. Both are legitimized to form a government and even the one with fewer representatives can lead.
Another different question is that we were in a majority system, with a tendency to promote bipartisanship. Then the one who gets the majority of votes would have to lead.
It must be remembered that Spain has a proportional system and in which the D'Hont Law formula is applied.
During the Electoral Reform Study Commission, each parliamentary group proposed speakers. Each one presented and defended what they believed was the best system for the Canary Islands. There were very few coincidences between the speakers, even speakers from the same group offered us different possibilities.
This can give us an idea of how complicated the situation is and the heterogeneity of models for our electoral system that has to represent the different population realities.
However, two things have become clear in the Commission: Firstly, the current system is not undemocratic, as some political forces have criticized, attacking us without reason, since no expert has said otherwise and that is also supported by the ruling of the Constitutional Court. Secondly, we all agreed on the convenience of lowering the electoral thresholds or barriers.
Unfortunately, the rest of the parliamentary groups, except the Agrupación Socialista Gomera (ASG), have labeled us as immobilists; which, according to the RAE, is the tendency to maintain a political, social, economic or ideological situation without changes. This is not true. Coalición Canaria put on the table an option that was to go from 60 to 63 parliamentarians (adding one to Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria and Tenerife), with the increase of one deputy for Fuerteventura (from 7 to 8) due to its strong demographic growth, and also increase the number of parliamentarians from Gran Canaria and Tenerife to improve proportionality.
We have taken steps towards consensus. And CC never had among its political lines to change the electoral system, but given the situation of the opposition, we decided to act. We broke the triple parity but we did not betray the principles of balance and solidarity, after a deep debate in our organization and in the highest decision-making body, the National Political Council.
Many people have told me, why not add another deputy to Lanzarote that has had a positive evolution of the population? My reflection has always been that this Archipelago is based on balance and solidarity or at least I believe so.
If we applied this population criterion in an orthodox way, the most populated islands (Tenerife and Gran Canaria) would have a few deputies, to the detriment of the islands with less population (Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, La Palma, El Hierro, La Gomera). We would therefore have an Archipelago with a great imbalance.
In any case, what we are deciding with a change of the electoral system is how we understand the Canary Islands, from a theoretical approach. I understand our Land from our island fact, from the island to the Archipelago, that is, to build the Canary Islands from the bottom up. Other political forces observe the Canary Islands from the political supremacy of a superstructure that is built from the top down. I bet on a Canary Islands as a whole where the aspirations of each island do not represent a brake for the development as a whole.
Another of the aspects that we most reject of the proposal of the opinion, is the rise, in "one fell swoop" of ten deputies, something inadmissible in the political and social times in which we live, where the figure is much questioned, not only of the politicians, but of our oversized Public Administration in terms of structure. For the time being, they will have to explain to the population the increase of those ten deputies, clarify how they are going to achieve that the budget of the Parliament does not increase, and comply with all the legal procedures in time so that the new electoral system can be applied. Well, now the state instability of a motion of censure joins, in a few days we will know if it will prosper and, if so, how it will affect the reform.
I am left with the bittersweet feeling that they were not really looking for the best electoral system that the Canarian population deserves, they were looking for how to defeat Coalición Canaria. In addition, with the reform proposal it seems that the panacea has been discovered to solve all the problems of this Land, as if all the evils started from our Canarian electoral system.
By Migdalia Machín Tavío, General Secretary of Coalición Canaria in Lanzarote
