The Eurochamber urges Spain to create a minimum voting threshold in the next European elections

Brussels – The European Parliament urged Spain on Wednesday to ratify the 2018 European electoral law in order to establish a national threshold of between 2% and 5% of the votes for the allocation of seats in the European elections, which is currently non-existent due to the agreement between the Government and nationalist parties not to implement it.

The text, which is not binding for Spain, sets out the conclusions of the mission of MEPs from the Constitutional Affairs Committee of the European Parliament who visited Madrid in May to learn about the obstacles to the entry into force of the reform of the European electoral law, given that Spain is the only country that has not yet ratified it and this prevents it from being applied in the 27 Member States.

The mission’s report urges Spain to begin the ratification process, although it does not refer to Spain directly but instead speaks of “the remaining Member State” that has not yet completed this procedure to allow the law to enter into force.

Compared with the original report drafted by the Partido Popular member Borja Giménez, negotiations between the political groups have removed several references to Spain, including criticism of the agreement between the Government and the nationalist parties that is currently blocking ratification.

PNV is one of the parties most opposed to this threshold and, precisely, it supported the investiture of Pedro Sánchez in 2023 in exchange for not reforming the electoral law and for ensuring that, if there were no other option than to ratify the European one, this would be done after reaching an agreement with them.

In the recent elections to the European Parliament, the coalition in which PNV stood obtained 1.63% of the votes and the party managed to keep its seat, which would not have happened if the European law had entered into force, since it requires Spain to have a minimum threshold of 2% because it has more than 35 seats in total.

The original report highlighted that from a legal point of view “no major obstacles to ratification were foreseen”, but the process is more delicate “from a political perspective” because a minimum threshold of 2% “implies the possibility that a few smaller political parties may be prevented from having elected MEPs”.

“Therefore, (…) it may prove particularly problematic for a political system as fragmented as the Spanish one,” the text acknowledged. (4 December)