Galicia goes to the polls today in the first meeting of the three that, at least, will take place this year, along with the Basque regional elections - still without an official date, although everything points to April 21 - and the European elections in June.
It is the first time that citizens vote after the change of scenario that the regional and municipal elections of 28-M and, above all, the general advances of 23-J and its corollary with a failed investiture and another successful one that did not arrive until almost four months after the elections.
The protagonists of both, Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Pedro Sánchez, are contesting their second electoral duel, this time for interposed candidates, in a political situation even more heated than in July.
This national struggle has insisted on coloring the campaign, but it is important to insist that Galicians today elect a Government that over the next four years will have to face challenges that deeply affect their daily lives, such as depopulation in an aging society or the crisis of a public health system that emerged very affected by the pandemic.
It was the strategy of the national PP that determined the slight advance of these elections and its initial approach of confrontation with the central government.
It is the PP, which has governed Galicia for 36 of the 42 years of autonomy, and its state leader who have the most at stake in maintaining the current 42 seats.
Galicia votes in a very different scenario than four years ago, when it did so in the middle of a pandemic.
Participation then remained at a bare 48.9% (after counting the vote abroad, of special relevance in a community historically marked by emigration), a percentage that will surely be exceeded today.
The surveys published until the last legal day paint a very close picture, with the possibility that the PP retains the absolute majority but also that it could lose it for the first time in years, even that it needs to support itself to continue in the Xunta in a populist formation as Ourensana Democracy.
In a situation that can be resolved by a handful of ballots, the vote of emigrants becomes more relevant, representing 17.7% of the census, but in provinces like Ourense it is close to 30%.
A mystery that, furthermore, will not be resolved until after Monday the 26th, the day on which the counting of the external vote begins.
Lower abstention in a community that has always voted more in general elections than in regional elections (almost seven points more participation on 23-J than in 2016, the last comparable regional elections) could be key to an alternation in the Government that would be historical.
The left entertains the possibility of returning to the Xunta 15 years later, but this time not with the PSOE, but with a BNG that only eight years ago was the fourth force in the community.
For the first time a nationalist formation (and for the first time a woman, Ana Pontón) has options to lead the Government of Galicia, an expectation inseparable from its decision to prioritize the social and transversal over the more identity-based in recent years.
This scenario would make the effects of these elections felt throughout national politics and especially in the leadership and way of opposing the PP.
Whatever the outcome, those who insist on repeating that Spain is a defective democracy will have another opportunity in today's elections to see how their predictions collide with the legitimacy that emanates from the institutional and citizen normality guaranteed by the State. of law.