Part 2 of 5

The instruction
that widened the law

Façade of the Supreme Court of Spain building, in Madrid.
The Supreme Court, which on 8 September 2026 suspended the electoral effects of the instruction. Photo: Luis García (Zaqarbal) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Behind the roll that decides the 29 November election lie four years of paperwork. There is an additional provision of the Democratic Memory Law, an administrative instruction that split its core requirement in two, and two Supreme Court orders that suspended the electoral effect of that instruction before the election was called. By the time anyone asked for the suspension to reach the electoral roll itself, the State Legal Service had already warned that reviewing each case individually would take months.

Proven exile

There is no such thing as a "grandchildren's law." What exists is the eighth additional provision of Law 20/2022 on Democratic Memory, which opens the option of Spanish nationality to three groups born outside Spain: the children of a person who was Spanish by origin and lost or renounced that nationality through exile; the children of Spanish women who lost it on marrying a foreigner before 1978; and the adult children of those who already obtained nationality under this same law or under the seventh additional provision of Law 52/2007. The underlying requirement is proven exile.[1][2]

The paragraph split in two

Implementing that provision fell to the Directorate-General for Legal Security and Public Trust (DGSJFP), and the instruction was signed by its director-general, Sofía Puente Santiago, on 25 October 2022. It was published in the official gazette — BOE-A-2022-17470 — and carries the rank of a regulation, below the law it was meant to apply.[3]

The key passage sits in its Guideline Seven. Section II.1 splits the first paragraph of the eighth additional provision in two, leaving two independent cases where the law had one. Under the first, anyone descended from a Spaniard by origin who lost nationality through exile qualifies. Under the second, descent from a Spaniard by origin is enough, regardless of exile. Section IV.3.5(d) adds one more piece, a presumption of exile for anyone who left Spain between 18 July 1936 and 31 December 1955.

With that, proven exile stops being the only door into nationality the law had opened. According to Newtral's analysis with two legal scholars, the widening goes "beyond what the law itself establishes" (translated from the original Spanish).[2]

An instruction is not a legal norm, but an internal directive from an administrative body aimed at interpreting or applying rules that already exist. Mercedes Soto Moya, professor of private international law (University of Granada) — Newtral (translated from the original Spanish)

That gap in legal rank is the source of the strongest argument made by those challenging the instruction: that a regulation contradicting the law it serves is void from the outset. Legal scholar Teresa Freixes sets it out in the most extensive analysis the case has received.[4] It is one side's argument. No authority has ruled on it, and what the Supreme Court decided in September falls well short of it.

Two orders and a dissenting opinion

On 8 September 2026, the Fourth Section of the Supreme Court's Administrative Litigation Chamber granted the injunction and suspended registration in the CERA — the overseas electoral roll — for those who had obtained nationality through the instruction, unless they could prove they were descendants of exiles. Nationality itself was left untouched; what was suspended was the entry on that roll. There are two orders, one per appeal — 1013/2026, filed by Iustitia Europa, and 1015/2026, filed by Vox — and the ruling carries a dissenting opinion. The CGPJ announced the ruling on the 8th, and the orders are dated and served on 10 September, when the legal reasoning is published. The Central Electoral Board complied with them by ruling of 14 September.[5][6]

The Supreme Court does not strike down the instruction. It flags two passages of Guideline Seven: II.1, the splitting of the paragraph, and IV.3.5(d), the presumption of exile. These are the two provisions the entire case turns on.[5]

The 5 October brief

Between 1 August, the date October's election call defers the electoral roll to, and the Supreme Court's suspension, five weeks go by. The order in which these two events happened decides the outcome. The election call brings into force the roll exactly as it stood on 1 August, and the registrations the Supreme Court suspended remain on it. If those registrations vote on 29 November, their ballots go into the box like any other, with no later step separating them from the count.

Asking for the suspension to reach that roll was the next step. On 5 October, Iustitia Europa filed an urgent brief asking for it to be enforced before 29 November. The State Legal Service had already argued, in its own appeal, that reviewing the files one by one would take months.[5][7]

The bottleneck

2.4–2.5 MApplications filed (EFE, ABC)
544,722 – 600,700Approved, depending on source and date (El País; El Confidencial as of 31 Aug)
306,000 – 370,000Registered on the overseas roll (El Confidencial as of 31 Aug)
~400,000Directly affected by the injunction (El Confidencial)

Applying for nationality, obtaining it, and ending up on the electoral roll are three different things, and most applicants fall away somewhere between the first and the third: of the millions of applications filed, only a fraction ends in approval, and only part of those approvals reaches the overseas roll. That gap is where the electoral effect is decided. There is also a figure that names three different things depending on who gives it and as of what date: the 370,000 figure is, for El Confidencial, registrations on the overseas roll as of 31 August; for the State Legal Service's own accounting, it is nationalities granted as of 1 August; and it is also the low end of the range of people affected by the injunction. Three different counts for a single number.[8][9]

None of the four is the figure. They are cuts taken at different dates from different sources, and should be read that way. As of 1 August, the State Legal Service also counted 230,000 pending registration in the civil registry and 640,000 unresolved applications. The State Legal Service itself, in its appeal, put at around 170,000 the naturalised citizens the injunction would leave unable to vote.[9][10]

In Argentina alone, where much of the demand is concentrated, Spain's consul general in Buenos Aires, José María Ridao Domínguez, put the number of appointment requests for this nationality at close to one million in July 2026 — 645,052 at the Buenos Aires consulate alone, the rest spread across Rosario, Córdoba, Mendoza and Bahía Blanca — within the 2.4 million worldwide figure already cited. That is a volume of requests, not of approvals or roll entries, the same gap that separates the four figures above. The consul estimated that, once those files were resolved, Buenos Aires could become the third-largest city in the world by Spanish population, behind only Madrid and Barcelona.[11]

The electoral impact is a range, from 1 seat in 2023 to 23 depending on which series is used, and it depends on how many registered voters cast a ballot and which province they are assigned to. The breakdown by province is not public; turnout is. In the 2023 election, 10.04% of the overseas roll voted, and the CERA vote moved one seat.[8][12]

The range rules out two flat claims. One is that the 29 November election will be decided there. The other was made on the radio by the transport minister, Óscar Puente: that in fifty years of democracy the overseas vote has never changed anything. Five counts contradict that, and they are in Part 3.

The application and approval figures are the flow coming in through the instruction; the CERA as a whole — the total number of electors resident abroad, with or without the grandchildren's law — is a different, and also growing, figure: 2,747,688 electors in 2026, 420,300 more than in 2023, an 18% rise in three years, according to El Español. It is not the same figure as the ones above, and should not be added to them.[13]

Ineco's reinforcement

Months before the Civil Registry draft, the government had already taken a first step to speed up these cases in Argentina. Before the General Council of Spanish Citizenship Abroad, senator César Mogo — the same senator who in October would take charge of the PSOE's overseas-vote operation (see Part 5) — announced that "an external support arrangement is about to be signed, through a state body, Ineco, to speed things up and get past the management problems" and "streamline nationality registrations" (translated from the original Spanish).[14]

Ineco is a state-owned company that in recent years has moved from railway engineering into technology consulting. The work it has been commissioned to do touches document and identity management for nationality cases, linked to the new electronic Civil Registry system, DICIREG. According to El Debate, the government classified the procedure and did not inform Parliament of its oversight protocols; as of this edition's closing, there has been no response from Ineco, the government or the PSOE.[14]

Ineco's chairman, Sergio Vázquez Torrón, appeared as a witness before the Supreme Court in April 2026 in the face-masks case, over the hiring by Ineco and Tragsatec of Jésica Rodríguez, the former partner of ex-minister José Luis Ábalos. Rodríguez testified that she had been paid €43,978 by the two companies without working: "I was getting paid and waiting for Koldo and Joseba to tell me what to do"; asked whether she had ever actually worked at the state-owned company, she answered "No" (translated from the original Spanish). There is no record that this case has any connection to the nationalisation contract: the two share the same company chairman, not the same judicial proceeding, and no outlet has established a link between them.[14]

The draft that speeds up the backlog

Two days after Iustitia Europa's brief, Moncloa was preparing the opposite move: speeding up the cases that produce those registrations. The Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with Parliament drafted a new Civil Registry regulation allowing the Directorate-General for Legal Security and Public Trust — the same body that signed the 2022 instruction — to "set internal rules for distributing cases among the different Civil Registry offices according to their workload," with a distribution the draft itself calls "equitable" and based on "objective efficiency criteria" (translated from the original Spanish). As of this edition, it remains a draft, not a published regulation: there is as yet no decree number or text in the official gazette.[15]

The stated goal is to speed up more than 500,000 nationalisation cases already granted under the grandchildren's law, of which 369,017 are registered on the CERA, according to the State Legal Service. The draft arrives less than two months before 29 November, with the Supreme Court still yet to resolve enforcement of its injunction and the State Legal Service arguing, in the same appeal cited above, that reviewing those cases one by one is materially impossible before 2027. Speeding up the distribution of workload between offices and reviewing the substance of each case are different operations, and the draft does not make clear which of the two takes priority.[15]

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References

  1. Law 20/2022 of 19 October on Democratic Memory, eighth additional provision. BOE-A-2022-17099.
  2. Newtral, "Qué dice la instrucción sobre la nacionalidad con la ley de nietos," 2 July 2026. newtral.es.
  3. Instruction of 25 October 2022 from the Directorate-General for Legal Security and Public Trust. BOE-A-2022-17470.
  4. Teresa Freixes, interview on Fuera de Guion Directo (63 min): the thesis that the instruction is void from the outset, on grounds of normative hierarchy. YouTube.
  5. CGPJ, "El Tribunal Supremo estima la medida cautelar… sobre inscripciones en el CERA," 8 September 2026. poderjudicial.es; EFE, 8 September 2026. efe.com.
  6. Central Electoral Board ruling of 14 September 2026 (file 209/361), headed "Autos de 10 de septiembre de 2026" and stating that "con fecha 10 de septiembre de 2026 se ha recibido en la Junta Electoral Central notificación de los Autos" ["on 10 September 2026 the Central Electoral Board received notice of the orders," translated from the original Spanish]. juntaelectoralcentral.es (PDF).
  7. The Objective, "Piden al Supremo que el censo del 29-N no incorpore altas paralizadas por la ley de nietos," 5 October 2026. theobjective.com.
  8. El País, "El Gobierno ha concedido desde 2022 la nacionalidad española a 544.722 descendientes…"; Newtral, "Qué es la ley de nietos…," 30 June 2026. newtral.es.
  9. Application and approval figures: EFE, via Newtral, "El Supremo y el voto de los nacionalizados…," 9 September 2026 (newtral.es) — "around 2.4 million… have applied for nationality"; ABC, "PSOE y Sumar desoyen a los letrados…," 30 September 2026 (abc.es) — "more than 2.5 million people… applied"; El Confidencial, 2 October 2026 (elconfidencial.com) — 600,700 approved and close to 370,000 registered as of 31 August; El Mundo, "El Supremo revisa el recurso del Gobierno…," 5 October 2026 (elmundo.es) — State Legal Service figures as of 1 August: ~370,000 granted, 230,000 pending registration and 640,000 unresolved applications. This outlet uses 9 September for the orders, the least supported of the three dates in circulation.
  10. El Debate, "La Abogacía recurre la paralización de la ley de nietos y ve imposible revisar 170.000 expedientes antes de 2027," 22 September 2026. eldebate.com.
  11. Expansión, "Casi un millón de argentinos han solicitado la nacionalidad española por la 'ley de nietos'," Amaia Ormaetxea, 6 July 2026. expansion.com.
  12. Libertad Digital, "El voto exterior se dispara tras la Ley de Nietos y podría alterar hasta 23 escaños en las generales," 7 September 2026. libertaddigital.com; El Confidencial, "El TS esquiva la enmienda trampa…," 2 October 2026. elconfidencial.com.
  13. El Español, "El PSOE encarga el voto exterior ante el 29-N al senador que incluyó en la 'ley de nietos' a los que emigraron 'en el siglo XIX'," Íñigo Zulet, 5 October 2026. elespanol.com.
  14. El Debate, "Ineco, la empresa pública que enchufó a Jésica, elegida para la nacionalización masiva de la Ley de Nietos en Argentina," Isabel Durán, 2 June 2026. eldebate.com.
  15. Vozpópuli, "Moncloa prepara un 'decretazo' para agilizar miles de expedientes de la 'ley de nietos'," Beatriz Jiménez Pérez, 7 October 2026. vozpopuli.com.

Numbered in order of first citation in the text. See also Sources.