A bill years in the making has just become a casualty of Spanish domestic politics. When Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez dissolved both chambers of Spain’s parliament and called snap elections for November 29, he also pulled the plug on a contentious piece of legislation: a proposal to grant Spanish nationality to Sahrawis born in Western Sahara during the period of Spanish administration, before 1976.
The bill had cleared a significant hurdle just weeks earlier. On September 10, Spain’s Congress of Deputies approved it by a vote of 168 to 31, with 145 abstentions, sending it on to the Senate for further review. The measure, championed largely by left-wing parties and especially the Sumar coalition, would have created a special, exceptional pathway to citizenship. The conservative Popular Party abstained, while the far-right Vox party voted against it outright. News agency Europa Press estimated that roughly 80,000 people stood to benefit.
Under the chamber’s own rules, however, passage in the lower house never amounted to final approval, since the text still needed Senate sign-off. Once the royal decree dissolving the Cortes was published in Spain’s official gazette, the BOE, on October 5, every pending bill, this one included, automatically lapsed.
Political scientist Ahmed Dardari, a professor at Abdelmalek Essaadi University in Tetouan and head of the International Center for Crisis Monitoring and Policy Forecasting, cautions against reading too much into the Sahara angle. The dissolution, he explains, stems from an internal government crisis tied to failed housing decrees, with no direct connection to the Western Sahara dispute, though its fallout swept up the citizenship bill regardless. In his view, the proposal reflected an attempt by segments of the Spanish left to revive an approach history has largely moved past, at a time when Madrid has already taken a clear position by backing the autonomy initiative under Moroccan sovereignty as the serious, realistic basis for resolving the conflict.
Whatever happens next hinges on the ballot box. A Popular Party comeback would make reviving the bill highly unlikely, while even a continuation of left-wing rule would force lawmakers to restart the legislative process from scratch, against an international backdrop in which recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Sahara keeps gaining ground.