Instead of recognizing its own obvious errors in predicting the outcome of recent regional elections in Galicia, the head of Spain’s Sociological Research Center (CSIC) blamed the resounding victory of the center-right Partido Popular on hard campaigning and—nuns.
The CSIC, a public research entity, has come under scrutiny and popular criticism in recent years. During the over five years that socialist Pedro Sánchez has held the country’s premiership, its polls have consistently favored the ruling party, the PSOE, predicting higher electoral outcomes for them than any other polls, and results above what tangible public sentiment and normal political cycles can justify—besides the fact that they have almost always proven to be wrong.
Elections in Galicia in February was the most recent and arguably egregious case. Contrary to other polls, the CSIC’s polls predicted that the PP would lose the absolute majority it has held in the region for years. According to the CSIC polls, even as the socialist coalition government faced strong opposition nationally, the Left in the region had a chance of gaining power over a less popular PP.
The attempt at explanation for the erroneous polling came from José Félix Tezanos, head of the CSIC, in the March issue of the magazine Temas, for which he is the editor. The article, entitled “New crossroads and electoral trends” credits the absolute majority the Popular Party garnered to “extraordinary economic gratifications” that regional presidential candidate Alfonso Rueda offered to the seafood fishers and to the “nuns” organizing “the vote of the residents” in the care homes they run. The statement implies that the PP bought votes from fishermen while the Galician convents swindled the people they cared for into voting for the PP.
Besides the activism of nuns, Tezanos asserts that the PP “turned on the alarms” at the possibility of losing its “great fiefdom” resulting in the “huge activism” that the party deployed in the last leg of the electoral campaign. Indeed, there could be some truth to this and it may be that the party learned its lesson from July’s national election when its election results were disappointing, leaving just enough room in a divided parliament for the Left to slip into power, despite having lost the election.
At the same time, Tezanos’ reasoning rings hollow, as the implied vote buying he references consisted of a long-standing commitment by PP candidate and incumbent Alfonso Rueda to provide government subsidies to fishermen following a disastrous Christmas fishing season in which they had hardly been able to harvest shellfish.
Indeed, what Tezanos categorized as “new crossroads and electoral trends” sounds simply like a hard-fought electoral campaign. Tezanos asserts that PP’s win in the region reflects the “power of the electoral machinery” of this party in Galicia, which it put into full gear for fear of losing “an autonomous community so important and so symbolic for them.” He also stated that it was “a logical and expected fact” for the PP to win and that it would have been “striking and surprising” for the party to have lost power in the region.
The question, then, is—why was Tezanos’ poll the only one that could not predict such a logical outcome?
