• PACMA hopes to build on record 2015 vote and win first seats in Congress
• Party fielding candidates for Congress & Senate in all 52 provinces nationwide
Spain’s animal-rights party PACMA hopes to win its first-ever representation in Congress in Sunday’s general election, hurdling the onerous barriers set in place by a national electoral law favoring incumbent parties that kept it from entering the lower house of parliament last year — despite its having won as many votes in the December general election than two other political parties that did secure seats in Congress.
PACMA (which stands for Partido Animalista Contra el Maltrato Animal, or the ‘Animalist Party Against Mistreatment of Animals’) hopes that on Sunday it will exceed its record vote tally from December of 220,369 votes for Congress and 1.034 million votes for the Senate. The party has again fielded candidates for both Congress and the Senate in all 52 provinces in Spain’s 17 regional communities and in the North African enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta — with women comprising an overwhelming majority on PACMA’s lists, accounting for 75 percent of the party’s Congressional candidates and 81 percent of the its candidates for Senate seats.
The party hopes to increase its share of the vote sufficiently in Sunday’s election to overcome the obstacle of a national electoral law skewed against new parties, while favoring incumbent parties that receive similar numbers of votes. PACMA was awarded no seats in Congress for its 220,369 votes won in the last election, yet the same number of votes netted two seats for the Basque separatist party Bildu and just 300,000 votes garnered six seats in Congress for the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV-EAJ).
► Read More in Spanish at El Periódico, El Mundo and La Gaceta …
► ► CLICK ABOVE TO WATCH PACMA 2015 ELECTION CAMPAIGN VIDEO ► ►
