The magistrate of the Constitutional Court Enrique Arnaldo is already a new member of the Royal Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation of Spain (RAJyL), where he entered yesterday with a speech on “The principle of electoral stability” in which he highlighted how democratic quality … of a country depends largely on your electoral system and in which he warns against the risk of digital power in electoral processes
Supported, among others, by the majority of his TC colleagues, including Vice-President Inmaculada Montalbán; the president and vice-president of the Supreme Court, Isabel Perelló and Dimitry Berberoff, respectively, and magistrates of this court like Pablo Lucas, Ignacio Sancho, Manuel Marchena or Antonio del Moral, Arnaldo assured that the “red index of priorities” today which is not resolved to achieve “electoral purity” is none other than the impact of digital power in the electoral competition, “an authentic existential challenge which exceeds the powers of the national electoral legislator”.
According to him, in the current digital era, the traditional concept of electoral campaign “has exploded” and the electoral legislator has not only found himself overwhelmed, “but he is disconcerted, incapable of reacting to the new sign of the times in the communication between political parties, also outdated, and citizens supplied by varied sources, of confused and unreliable origins”.
Arnaldo also spoke about disinformation that maneuvers “placidly through social networks” and its “significant threatening impact on the integrity of elections and the health of democracy, which cannot be defended by contravening its own values and principles and, chief among them, freedom of expression and freedom of political action.”
It is a “notorious fact,” Arnaldo said, that a set of “exogenous forces aim to erode democracy through interference in the electoral process”, a risk against which States have the duty to inexorably apply what is established in Article 3.1 of the Additional Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights, which establishes “the positive obligation to guarantee the compatibility of freedom of expression with the holding of free elections even in the absence of direct evidence of manipulation, and always in a balanced and proportionate manner”.
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