Spain’s Supreme Court has provisionally suspended the voting rights of many individuals who’ve obtained Spanish citizenship via the Democratic Memory Law, commonly known as the ‘Grandchildren’s Law’.
On September 8th 2026, Spain’s Supreme Court ordered a temporary suspension of voting rights for people who obtained Spanish nationality via the Democratic Memory Law.
This is unless they can directly prove that they are descendants of Spaniards who were exiled as a result of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.
According to government figures, at least 2.4 million descendants applied for Spanish nationality via the route.
READ ALSO: Everything you need to know about Spain’s Grandchildren Law citizenship scheme
This increases the number of overseas voters, something that right-wing parties in Spain have decried as electoral engineering and was the impetus behind the legal challenge.
Citizenship applications via the Law of Democratic Memory (referred to as La Ley de Nietos or Grandchildren’s Law in English) have been in force since October 2022.
The scheme offered a route for millions around the world who qualified by being descendants of Spaniards who fled Spain during the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, the vast majority in Latin American countries.
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However, the ruling revolves around the legal definition of who can and can’t qualify for citizenship via the Grandchildren’s Law, and whether they should automatically gain voting rights.
The law was originally designed to extend citizenship rights to descendants of exiles specifically from the Civil War and subsequent dictatorship, but the Spanish government later widened the criteria to descendants of Spaniards who left the country between 1936 and 1955.
The court therefore partially upheld an application lodged by far-right Vox and the Iustitia Europa party to suspend the immediate registration on the electoral roll of those who obtained Spanish nationality via the law, at least until a final ruling can be made.
These two Spanish far-right groups claim that extending citizenship to the descendants of exiled Spaniards inflates the electoral roll, presumably to the advantage of Spain’s ruling Socialists.
The Supreme Court’s decision leaves in limbo the right to vote for all those who gained nationality in this way, as well as those who had booked appointments at consular offices.
According to the legal text, passed in October 2022: “Those born outside Spain to a father or mother, or a grandfather or grandmother, who were originally Spanish, and who, as a result of having been exiled for political, ideological or religious reasons, or on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity, have lost or renounced their Spanish nationality, shall be eligible for Spanish nationality,” states the text of the Act, which was passed on 19 October 2022.
Such proof must be issued by consular registry officials, the ruling states.
The Supreme Court has ordered the Central Electoral Board (JEC) to instruct consulates to sort registered voters living abroad into two clear categories based on how they obtained their citizenship through the Grandchildren’s Law.
Category 1 would include people who qualified directly under the exile criteria written into the original Democratic Memory Law, while Category 2 would group people who qualified following looser administrative rules and automatic legal shortcuts introduced later in 2022.
In other words, instead of lumping all new naturalised voters into a single pool, Spain’s Supreme Court wants full transparency on who gained voting rights strictly by the original text of the law versus who gained them through later, broader executive guidelines.
Spanish media reports suggest that those in Category 1 will retain their right to vote, whilst those in Category 2 will lose it, at least until the court delivers its final ruling.
Both Spain’s Public Prosecutor’s Office and the state legal services have opposed the suspension on the grounds that it would infringe the “right to vote, a fundamental right recognised in the Constitution”.
Spain’s Justice Minister, Félix Bolaños, rejected this interim measure, arguing that it “suspends the right to vote of thousands of Spaniards”.
Bolaños called on the Supreme Court to resolve the issue before forthcoming elections, scheduled sometime before August 2027:
“We are talking about the most sacred of rights: the right to vote.”
