MADRID, Spain – The minor party Iustitia Europa is asking the Supreme Court to suspend the general election scheduled for 29 November. In an urgent filing submitted this morning, the party relies on the arguments sent on Thursday by the State Attorney’s Office, in which the state’s legal services argued that the snap election makes it “materially impossible” to review the naturalisation files of those registered under the grandchildren’s law that the High Court has called into question.
Supreme Court Suspends Voting Rights For Those Registered Under ‘grandchildren’s Law’
“The vote must be held under conditions that guarantee the full effectiveness of the judicial ruling in force. The temporary suspension of the vote preserves the useful result of the precautionary protection and simultaneously protects the integrity and legitimacy of the electoral process,” the filing says.
The party demands that, if the court considers a halt disproportionate, measures be taken to guarantee the traceability of the votes of the 163,020 voters descended from exiles who obtained nationality, and the right to vote, through the instruction that presumes that condition for all Spaniards who left Spain between 18 July 1936 and 31 December 1955, which the Supreme Court has focused on.
It therefore proposes the computer flagging of those voters in the census closed on 1 August 2026, which is the one to be used for the 29 November vote, arguing that this subsidiary measure does not preventively deprive any citizen of the right to vote nor alter the electoral calendar but absolutely guarantees the traceability of the ballots cast by this group. It maintains that in the event of a ruling upholding the main claim, the impact of those votes could be audited and surgically purged in the general count.
In a filing registered on Thursday, the State Attorney’s Office again asked the Supreme Court to lift the precautionary measures that could leave more than 160,000 descendants of repression victims without the right to vote in the coming general election. It said either all Spaniards registered in the census of residents abroad are suspended, since the data it holds are globally those of Spaniards without distinction, or none are, because it is materially impossible to distinguish one from another in the very brief period available.
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The State Attorney’s Office recalled that electoral law establishes that the census for 29 November is the one closed on 1 August, before the judicial decision, and must be made available for consultation on Monday 12 October. The state’s legal services had already argued in a filing prior to the election call that it was not feasible for the 16 consulates that hold 85 per cent of the registrations to analyse them before 1 January 2027, when the census was due to close for next year’s electoral cycle, and now reducing that period to a few days confirms that material impossibility, insisting that in weighing interests, faced with the risk of the immediate sacrifice of a fundamental right, what must prevail is the exercise of the right to participate.
