The parties of Frente Amplio (FA) and Podemos have opened a battle before the Central Electoral Board (JEC) over the distribution of the "inheritance" of the Sumar coalition, with which they ran together in the 2023 general elections and which now conditions both the timing in electoral news programs and the slots of free propaganda advertisements in the campaign for the elections of next November 29.
This week, the JEC has activated the parties commission in charge of validating the distribution of propaganda time and spaces in public media, a distribution that is established according to the results obtained in the previous elections. The first meeting of this body will be held on November 4, the date on which the proposal submitted by RTVE is expected to be known.
To prepare that proposal for the distribution of spaces and news minutes, RTVE asked the JEC for criteria on how to assign the electoral rights of the Sumar coalition of 2023, since its components have now split between the Frente Amplio led by Ada Colau, the Podemos party headed by Irene Montero and other territorial forces.
Taking as a reference the doctrine of the JEC and analyzing the affiliation of the deputies who won a seat in 2023, RTVE made a first proposal for the distribution of seats by party: 10 deputies for Movimiento Sumar, five for IU, five for Podemos, four for Catalunya en Comú and the rest for the other formations that made up the coalition.
PODEMOS CLAIMS 20%
Podemos, however, maintains that around half a dozen of the deputies elected in 2023 are independents and, therefore, should not be counted in favor of any specific organization, and that another two belong to formations that have already disappeared. From that perspective, only 23 of the 33 seats won by Sumar should be counted, which, according to its calculations, would give the purples around 21% of the coalition's electoral rights.
Frente Amplio maintains a different thesis: it considers that the quota corresponding to Catalunya en Comú should increase from four to five deputies and takes it for granted that practically all the seats, except for the five it recognizes to Podemos, would be integrated into its new coalition.
For now, the Central Electoral Board has leaned in this first showdown to the side of Frente Amplio, by accepting that En Comú have one more deputy with respect to the initial proposal of RTVE and rejecting Podemos' argument to classify six of the deputies elected in 2023 as independents. "The documentation provided by the representation of Podemos does not allow reaching an "indubitable and unequivocal" conclusion about the affiliation as independents of the six deputies to whom its allegations refer. Therefore, the assignment to the formations proposed by RTVE seems appropriate," it has ruled.
The body recalls that, to determine the electoral rights of a coalition, the votes obtained by the joint candidacy of Sumar must be taken, divided by the number of deputies achieved and the result multiplied by the number of candidates of the political formation that is now standing alone and that obtained a seat. In addition, if any of the organizations that made up the coalition does not run either alone or in alliance in the new elections, the votes and seats attributed to it are divided among the remaining forces.
PENDING FROM THE RTVE PLAN
Added to this is that "if it is not possible to prorate the votes obtained by a candidacy of an electoral coalition, given that these were obtained by the whole of it without specification of those obtained by each political formation, the number of votes must be divided equally among the political formations that make up the coalition".
The next chapter of this confrontation will arrive with the presentation of RTVE's Information Coverage Plan and its definitive proposal for electoral propaganda spaces. Beforehand, the purple formation has already advanced that it intends to fight to be present also in the electoral debates, even if that implies sharing a lectern with Frente Amplio.