The european elections They are held in all the countries of the European Union, also in Spain, and each one with its rules, its deadlines and yes, also their candidates. The Germans choose the deputies they send to the European Parliament, the Lithuanians do the same and we Spaniards choose from the more than 2,200 people who have presented themselves as candidates for the 34 matches and coalitions that have been presented. Of the formations that attend the European ones, many of them are more than well-known (PSOE, PP, Vox, Podemos, Sumar…) and are presented in a unitary way; others do so in coalition and sometimes some candidates present themselves only in some kind of formation created specifically for European candidates.

That is why when voting, Loyal voters of certain parties may encounter some problems when locating their favorite party. For example, in the past general elections, ERC was the fifth party with the most votes, taking seven seats in the Congress of Deputies. But who can the almost half a million people who less than a year ago elected Esquerra Republicana vote for?

Something similar can happen with the half a million Galicians who opted for the BNG in the Galician elections of February, the more than 370,000 PNV voters or almost 350,000 EH Bildu voters in the basque elections last April. If all of these are absolutely loyal voters and want to repeat with the same formation, now in the European elections, who should they vote for? To know this, you have to know that some parties do not appear, but many do, in different coalitions than the rest of the elections in Spain.

Of among the formations that obtained representation in the general elections (2023), Galician, Basque or Catalan elections (2024), there are some that may not appear on this list of parties that will take place on 9J but will appear. This is not the case, for example, of Democracia Ourensana, whose leader holds the Mayor’s Office of Ourense and who just a few months ago, in February, managed to bring a regionalist party to the Xunta de Galiciaor the Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (CUP), a party that has traditionally been opposed to European institutions.

But what about the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG)? And with EH Bildu? These parties have historically appeared in the European elections, although now we are not able to find their names on any of the ballots that will be placed on the polling station tables on June 9. This is because they participate hand in hand with other formations, with nomenclatures that may be different to us.

Thus, in these European elections, BGN, EH Bildu and Esquerra Republicana are running, for example, under the umbrella of Ahora Repúblicas, which also has among its ranks candidates from the Balearic Ara Més. For their part, the PNV, Unión por el Pueblo Navarro and Canarian Coalition also compete in these elections, although they do so under the Coalition for a Europe of Solidarity (CEUS)created for the 2019 European elections as a result of the Coalition for Europe, previously made up of Democratic Convergence of Catalonia, Democratic Union of Catalonia, PNV and CC.