Foreign EU elderly citizens before the polls: the 2015 local elections in Spain

Ageing, European integration and human mobility beyond national frontiers are three intertwined processes shaping Spain as an international retirement place. Insofar as the quality of democracy has to do with citizens’ political involvement, the aim of this paper is to analyse to what extent foreign EU retirees residing in Spain are using their right to vote in the local elections. Interestingly, the last local elections, held in 2015, were part of a substantial change of the Spanish party system throughout the Great Recession. However, gerontomigrants’ mobilization has not been addressed up to this moment. This empirical study focuses on the characteristics and intensity in which foreign elderly citizens mobilized in the last Spanish local elections, with special attention to EU seniors. The previous elections, held in 2011, will be examined from a comparative perspective. Main data to be analysed will mostly be provided by the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE) – both the electoral register and the population census. They will be complemented with the MIRES3i survey, which, in 2011, addressed 720 foreign European retirees (pensioners aged 50 years and over) of 16 nationalities (those of the EU-15 plus those coming from Norway and Switzerland) living in Spain. Following the formalisation of European citizenship and the freedom of movement and residence within the European Union for the citizens of the Member States, the EU has been transformed into a trans-national zone criss-crossed not only by tourists, but also by students, workers and patients, as well as retirees seeking a better quality of life (Benson and O’Reilly 2009). Throughout Europe, new areas of retirement settlement have emerged as a result. Spain encompasses some of the largest and most important territories in Europe receiving people in retirement age or close to it from other countries. Most international retirement migrants (Rodríguez 2005; Warnes 2004; King et al. 2000; Williams et al. 1997) or gerontomigrants (Echezarreta 2005) come from Northern and Central European countries. Most of them come from the fifteen older EU Member States (hereafter referred to as 'EU-15', Spain excluded) and to a lesser extent from both the rest of EU Member States1 and non-EU countries. Whether traditional migrants or transnational migrants (see Favell 2009; Gustafson 2008 and 2004), and relocating either permanently or temporarily, they are certainly practicing the European rights both to move and reside within the Union. Along with them, European citizens have also been conferred the right at the core of democracy – the right to vote and stand as candidates in the Member State of residence, concretely, in both European and local elections. Thus, they become part of the political community. They are more than just foreign residents and consumers (see Janoschka and Durán 2014; Huete and Mantecón 2012; Janoschka 2010a and 2010b; Durán 2005). This paper analyses the political engagement of elderly migrants to Spain at the local level by focusing upon their electoral mobilization. 1 The EU-15 comprises Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Following the collapse of their regimes in 1989, many former communist countries from central and eastern Europe became EU members in two waves, between 2004 and 2007. In 2013, Croatia became the 28th country to join. Foreign European citizens living in Spain were made eligible to vote for the first time in 1999 and exercised this right for the fifth and last time by now, together with other foreign residents, in May 2015. To what extent? Scholars have observed that cosmopolitan European elite migrants – whom Favell (2009) refers to as “Eurostars” – seem to be fairly detached from local politics (see also Huete and Mantecón 2012; Collard 2010; Durán 2005). 2 Scholars also derive from their empirical studies that political turnout in local elections among immigrants and foreign-born nationals is often quite low (Bird et al. 2011; Messina 2007), and that it is even lower in districts with a predominance of immigrants (Siemiatycki 2006; Jones-Correa 2005). Do foreign seniors with voting rights in Spain follow this pattern? Has there been any change as a result of the Great Recession or for any other reason? What factors help explaining such findings? Being our case study the Spanish local elections held in 2015, the research drawns upon basic data provided by the Spanish National Statistics Institute, responsible for the electoral census and the population register. Once the Spanish electoral system is summarized, specially attending to the main characteristics that affect foreigners’ participation and representation, the following section will deal with their distribution and concentration throughout the territory at the national, regional and local level. Then we will describe and analyse electoral mobilization by attending to a number of possible explaining factors – age, identity community, relative size of fellow migrants’ community, and population size of the localities where they have settled. Institutional and political variables will previously be addressed as would-be explanations of an unusually high level of inscription on the electoral roll. In order to better understand seniors’ electoral practice of European citizenship abroad, we will address voter-turnout with regard to socio-demographic and political features such as gender, nationality, school level, income, time of residence in Spain both per year and as live time, amongst others. Data will come from the MIRES3i survey. In 2008, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spanish National Research Council) together with seven Spanish universities started a representative, large scale, multi-method research project called MIRES3i (International Retirement Migration in Spain: Identity, Impacts, Integration) investigating the multiple facets of European retirement migration to Spain. The interdisciplinary research was carried out in the most important regions of retirement migration in Spain (Andalusia, Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Catalonia, Murcia and Valencia) by means of a standardised questionnaire addressed to 720 foreign European retirees (pensioners aged 50 years old and over) of 16 nationalities (those of the EU-15 plus those coming from Norway and Switzerland) living in Spain more than three months per year. The face-to-face questionnaire survey was conducted between April 2010 and February 2011. It is the first European survey national in scope addressing to such a multinational population (see also Casado et al. 2004). Spanish electoral system and data gathering The Maastricht Treaty (1992) formally introduced for the first time in the European integration process the idea of a political union. European citizenship as a principle was formalized, and fullage European citizens residing in a Member State of which they are non-nationals were granted both voting rights and eligibility as candidates in local and European elections. The Spanish Constitution was amended to attend to this requirement that same year. Neither the Union nor Spain have granted other voting rights, such as the right of EU citizens to vote in regional or general elections or for non-EU nationals as a whole to elect any form of political representative. In Spain, Norwegians have council election voting rights on a reciprocal basis since 1991. Suffrage right was also granted to nationals of six American countries (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Peru) plus those of Cape Verde, Iceland and New Zealand for the 2011 local elections (see Rodríguez 2016; Durán and Martín 2008; Shaw 2011 and 2007; Messina 2007: ch.7; Earnest 2006). The right has been extended to nationals from the American Trinidad 2 For an analysis of the low level of political participation of EU citizens at European Parliament elections held in their host countries, see Vintila (2016). and Tobago and from the Asian Republic of Korea since the 2015 local elections. Non-EU citizens are required a minimum of five years’ legal residence (three years in the case of Norwegians) in order to be able to exercise their suffrage rights.3 The Spanish electoral system was set forth in the pre-constitutional electoral law of 1977, and updated in 1985, seven years after the Constitution had been enacted. In order to vote, registration in the electoral census is essential. Unlike Spaniards, European Union and other foreigners with voting rights aged 18 and older must previously communicate their desire to vote in the municipal elections to the delegation of the Electoral Census Office of their province of registration4 either directly or through the Town Hall of their place of residence, once registered on the population roll.5 Constituencies coincide with municipalities in local elections. The number of councillors to be elected in each municipality is determined, from a minimum of five, by the number of inhabitants of all ages (both natives and foreigners) registered on the local census of population. Seats are given according to the electoral D’Hondt formula.6 Candidate lists need to receive at least five per cent of the valid vote to be represented in town halls, namely the formula is not applied to those lists that fail to pass such a threshold, leading to their being ignored. The office-holders are drawn from each list using the exact ordering in which the candidates were listed.7 A different case are the localities with fewer than 250 residents. In these villages,8 the electorate does not choose among lists of candidates but among candidates themselves, and the aforementioned electoral formula is not applied. Each elector can vote for up to four candidates, whatever his/her list. The candidates that one-by-one sum up more votes are those who become officially invested as co