Sonia García, 36, uses the counter of her neighborhood grocery store as a bar.
It's Friday, noon, and García dries up her soda while she's out with the neighbors who come to buy.
“This is much cheaper than Mercadona!” jokes the woman.
The 500 euros that she has left in pay, after losing her job as a cleaner due to the pandemic, she barely distributes to buy the support of her husband —also unemployed— and her five children.
“I didn't vote on Sunday.
I'm not going to vote so come here those from the PSOE, PP or Vox to ask me on their knees.
They have millions of euros of European funds and do nothing for the neighborhood.
They have us abandoned”, exclaims García, while she points to the floor full of garbage, cracks and glass.
Her apartment, a few meters from the premises,
It is in one of the half-ruined buildings in the area popularly known as Las Vegas, the humblest of Las 3,000 Viviendas, one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in Seville and in Spain.
The street in which García lives as best he can, Viridiana, is in the district that last Sunday registered the data with the lowest participation in all of Andalusia in the June 19 elections: only 10.8% of those registered turned out to vote.
"He says that if we vote in the neighborhood," Garcia asks another client.
— How are we going to vote?
With the tickets that the Government earns and they have the neighborhood without electricity!
They are dogs!
Because electricity is the biggest concern that the residents of the neighborhood have right now, after four months without electricity due to marijuana plantations, whose illegal connections to the network have caused a shortage of supplies in the area.
Drug trafficking, added to the high level of conflict, means that police cars are constantly passing by.
“Here we are not all the same.
Because one commits a crime, we all pay.
And politicians do nothing for the neighborhood for that.
Neither PP, nor PSOE, nor any political party helps us”, criticizes Nicanor Silvas, a 56-year-old street vendor.
On Utopía Street, Farina Navarro, 23, looks with despair and longing, from her window, at the new transformer that the Administration has just installed.
“For now, only a few houses have electricity,” the man complains in the living room of his house, along with his mother, his wife and his sister-in-law, in a small space where there is a sofa, an unused television and a cart. supermarket in which he transports the scrap he collects to throw away.
"I didn't go to vote because they didn't tell me," he says.
The high level of illiteracy is another endemic problem in the neighborhood.
One of the streets of Las 3,000 Viviendas. PACO PUENTES
The stairs of the Navarro block are dark, half broken and the smell of unhealthiness is pervasive.
Outside, the buildings with half-open facades —as if they had been hit by a missile— give shade to those who spend the morning in the cool, on neighborhood benches or in plastic chairs that come down from their house, in front of one of the murals that were painted years ago to revitalize the area: a huge face of Camarón de la Isla. Las 3,000 Viviendas is located in the Polígono Sur neighborhood of Seville, which has repeated as the one with the lowest average annual net income per inhabitant in Spain, at a rate of 5,666 euros per person, according to INE data for 2021.
Beyond the grocery store and the Entre Amigos association, which helps residents with bureaucratic procedures, there is not a trace of more business premises among the neighborhood's arcades.
Cartas Marruecas or Tristana, in addition to Viridiana, are among the streets that make up the grid of the census district with the highest abstention in Andalusia, in which, those who did vote, did so mostly for the PSOE (24 votes, 41.4%), followed by PP (10 supports, 17.2%), Vox (8, 13.8%), Adelante Andalucía (7, 12.1%) and Por Andalucía (4, 6.9%).
In total, 35 votes for the left and 18 for the right.
Several older ladies agree that they took the ballot "of the rose" —in reference to the Socialist Party—, because it is the formation to which they have "always" given their support.
Andrea Nogales, 32, is the exception.
Mother of an eight-year-old girl with special needs, and with a Bachelor's degree, Nogales came to the neighborhood due to "circumstances of life" and she survives with her husband with a monthly help of 182 euros.
She voted for Adelante Andalucía.
“We are having a very bad time.
More now without light.
I voted for Teresa Rodríguez because I follow her on social networks and it seems to me that she fights for the people.
And to see if this changes a bit, ”says Nogales, rueful.
Disaffection and beach in Malaga
In another of the poorest neighborhoods in Andalusia, Palma-Palmilla, in Malaga, the feeling last Friday was similar to that in Las Vegas.
Jennifer, 29, and her mother, Silvia, 46, have breakfast at one of the tables in the Ferna bar, overflowing with people. melted cheese—on the table, they affirm that no one went to vote on June 19.
Silvia explains that she could not go because she had to work “and there is no point in losing clients”.
Her daughter is less explicit: "She didn't give me that point of going."
"I have never voted," she says, aware that she has already had several opportunities in her life.
The case of Jennifer and Silvia is not exceptional in a neighborhood that registers the highest abstention rate in the city of Malaga.
The census sections of the area, which surround the premises, are around 20% participation, almost a third of the provincial average, which is around 60%.
In the regional elections of June 19, an unusual figure of low participation was recorded throughout Andalusia: only 58.4% voted, fewer citizens than ever.
And in Palma-Palmilla, only one in five residents exercised the right to vote, a figure similar to that of the last general and municipal elections for a neighborhood that accumulates seven of the only 14 census sections in which the PSOE obtained more votes than the PP in the Malaga capital.
Jennifer and Silvia's grandfather and father always voted and was faithful, precisely, to the socialists.
A mother and her children walk along a street in the Palma-Palmilla neighborhood. García-Santos
Ángel Valencia, Professor of Political Science and Administration at the University of Malaga, sums it up this way: “There is a component of disaffection as a result of income level, social exclusion, the context.
To this is added that nobody responds to their needs and that the left has not known how to mobilize: their campaign has been decaffeinated, but also their opposition work in recent years.
In Palma-Palmilla, with almost 80% youth unemployment, the submerged economy is the lifeline of what José Miguel Santos, a teacher at the Misioneras Cruzadas concerted school, defines as "the other city".
“There is a component of disaffection as a consequence of the level of income and social exclusion.
To this is added that nobody responds to their needs and that the left has not known how to mobilize "
Ángel Valencia, Professor of Political Science
Santos knows a good part of the neighbors because he has taught or teaches their children, that is why he does not stop saying hello while having a coffee at the Ferna bar.
There he offers one more reason for the high rate of abstention: “Children come to school less and that makes them have fewer words to express how they are, how they feel.
This poverty of communication makes them feel that their word does not count.
And, in the long run, that their vote does not serve to communicate either, so they do not go to vote”.
When he collects the bill, the owner of the business, Fernando, adds yet another reason: "Here everyone goes to the little beach early, surely that had an influence," he concludes while someone asks him for another half.
The uneasiness and the day laborers of Puerto Serrano
Every day, at three and five in the morning, the entrances to the town of Puerto Serrano (Cádiz) are filled with day laborers, ready to go to the fields to collect potatoes and melons.
It doesn't matter if it's hot or not, if it's a holiday or a working day, fruit doesn't understand waiting in season.
Last Sunday, while Andalusia was still rushing the break before election day, the picture was repeated.
That is one of the reasons that the mayor of the town, Daniel Pérez, of Izquierda Unidas, (IU), finds so that his municipality would once again take the bitter merit of being one of the points of greatest abstention in the community.
But there are more reasons, also provided by the residents: the lack of alternatives to the countryside and economic resources or, directly, the poverty that devastates certain neighborhoods and makes them sick to the point of giving up voting.
Only 11.8% of the residents with the right to vote in one of the town's census districts were encouraged to go to the polls last Sunday, just under 63 people, which places it as the second neighborhood with the highest abstention rate. Andalusia.
The percentage was up to 7.2 points less than in the last regional elections and lowered the average participation of the town, of 7,000 residents, to 32.41%, less than half of the 68.33% registered in the same town in 2018. The most abstentionist area coincides with the center of the town and a nearby neighborhood, located on the outskirts and articulated around Guadalete Avenue, a road known for being one of the most worrying points of social exclusion and drug trafficking in the province of Cadiz.
“The area has alarming data on rents, school absenteeism or electricity fraud.
Three day laborers from Puerto Serrano collect melon from the field. JUAN CARLOS TORO
Rafael Carrasco, 74, lives on Sevilla Street, just off Guadalete Avenue.
He and the rest of his family —there are four of them, including his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law— voted, although he admits that the others were almost forced: “In my house we always vote.
I've always been from the PSOE, but I didn't like Susana [Díaz] so it's the first time I've voted for the PP, but only because I like [Juan Manuel] Moreno”.
Carrasco, a retired seasonal worker, believes that the record abstention rate in his neighborhood is explained by the fact that many of his neighbors "are in the strawberry or potato season."
"Before they gave us hours to go, but not anymore and doing it by mail is very difficult," the old man intervenes.
Paloma Rivera, 33, has gone from campaign to campaign, although now only her husband works as a day laborer -he is in the tomato industry, in the nearby town of Villamartín-, since with their two young daughters "there is no time, nor does it compensate look for a babysitter”.
He did not vote on 19-J, nor did he do so in 2018, nor in the general elections.
“I only vote for the people, why the rest?
If it's worth nothing”, she interjects crudely, before losing herself in some streets festooned with lights and banners for the Feria Chica that is celebrated these days in the town.
Decisions like Rivera's are what make Pérez uneasy and sad, although she understands them: “When there is unemployment, they have a hard time;
when they have work they are crushed and they are not well.
There is a rupture between what people see and their living conditions, and that generates political disaffection”.
Decorating the streets of Puerto Serrano for the celebration of the "Chica" Fair. Juan Carlos Toro
50% off
Exclusive content for subscribers
read without limits
subscribe
I'm already a subscriber