Article initially published on July 14, 2018
In these days of a new PSOE government, of also new candidates to preside over the Popular Party, we think a lot about “presidents.” Therefore, we have asked ourselves, who would be our president if we elected him like in the United States?
The answer is that we have no idea, because our system is not presidential but parliamentary, our constituency is the province and not the State, and because... well, because of many other details that we are not going to develop.
But this is a simple game so we are going to simplify a lot: let's imagine that our provinces were like each of the States in the country of Trump and Hillary. Let's use the data we have to see what crazy stuff we come up with.
There the president is elected by a group of delegates, a total of 538. Each State designates a number equal to the sum of its representatives (congressmen) and senators. Then, when it comes to appointing the president, all the delegates of that State will vote for the candidate who has won there, even if it is by a single vote difference. So you can win the presidency in votes but lose it in delegates for the United States as a whole. In fact, this is what happened to Hillary Clinton, who triumphed over Trump by almost three million votes, but she was defeated because she only got 232 delegates compared to the 306 that her rival garnered.
What would happen in Spain if we applied a system like this?
First of all we have looked at the last general elections held. If in America 538 delegates are appointed, in Spain there would be 558 (350 deputies and 208 provincial senators). Distributing them with the same criteria, we would have this map from 26-J-2016:
If in Spain we had a presidential system like the American one, Rajoy would be the president according to the 2016 elections and... he would continue to be so even today, because there would be no motions of censure or anything similar that could have prevented it.
But there would also have been other curious differences. Second place, not in votes but in delegates, would have gone to Pablo Iglesias, instead of Pedro Sánchez. Furthermore, in several provinces of Catalonia and the Basque Country, the paradox could occur that a nationalist candidate would triumph who did not really aspire to the presidency, since this requires a presence throughout Spain. They would, therefore, be a kind of non-candidates or protest-candidates. Finally, Albert Rivera would have obtained a resounding rosco, an absolute zero in delegates, which is what matters.
But today things have changed so much that perhaps we should not look at 2016 but at the current reality. Extrapolating the current surveys to the map of Spain and assigning representatives as in “America”, we obtain this map updated as of July 2018:
In a hypothetical presidential election to be held today, with the center-right vote divided almost equally between the PP and Ciudadanos, and with the PSOE relatively prominent, this party would have enough advantage to win in most provinces, even if it were in many of them by a narrow margin, and in this way take their delegates (all of them). With these credentials, Pedro Sánchez would be elected president, apparently, without many problems. The PP candidate, whether called Soraya or Pablo, would reach more than a hundred delegates and an honorable, but unproductive, second place. Further afield, Albert Rivera could achieve victory in a couple of provinces, which, being very populated, would leave him in a less humiliating position than in 2016. The nationalist non-candidates would improve positions, and, finally, Pablo Iglesias would be left far behind, dismantled by the Sánchez alluvium.
Of course, this is just an exercise, a game. If we had done this same experiment a year ago, the absolute winner would have been... Mariano Rajoy, who today has disappeared from the political scene. But if we had done it just two months ago!! The presidency of the country would have been taken from Albert Rivera Street.
So are the things. Everything can change in the blink of an eye, because that's how volatile public opinion is, and because that's how radical (in its effects) the American system turns out to be.
Jose Salver
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