Expat developments in Spain mean that many towns now have electorates where locals are in the minority
impassioned Colin Timms was on the campaign stump in Rojales, eastern Spain, just around the corner from The George pub and a shopping street packed with bars offering Tetley's beer, all-day British breakfasts, karaoke nights and evening quizzes.
"The British do not forget and that is why we put the socialists out at the last election," he told an audience of silver-haired expats in Ciudad Quesada, a residential estate with signs advertising a British dental surgery, Danny's Garage and the cheddar cheese sold at The Chop House butchers.
"You are the people who will decide," he insisted, as he urged them to vote in Sunday's Spanish municipal elections. "You can break or break the whole of Rojales."
Timms is one of a new breed of local politicians in Spain – those who deliver a British vote that is decisive in towns where huge expat residential estates have dramatically altered local demographics, sometimes turning native Spaniards into a minority.
The vote will almost certainly make Timms deputy mayor of a town where Britons make up some 40% of the 7,000-strong voters' register and where his local Independent Rojales Group (GRIP) party's two councillors already holds the balance of power on the council.
This time they should get at least four of the 24 council seats, he said, though he needs reluctant expats to drag themselves away from Sky television or the bowls club and get to the voting booths.
"Some Brits are bloody lazy," complained Timms, a retired lecturer whose party has gone into coalition with the town's ruling conservative People's party (PP). "It's hard to get them off their arses to vote."
The mayor, Antonio Martínez, who has taken his PP party into coalition with Timms, knows the importance of British voters, who often speak only very basic Spanish. "Excuse me. I speak Spanish. I no speak English. I'm sorry," a bashful Martínez stuttered to the same audience.
Martínez's campaign literature – like that of the candidates for his party – comes in Spanish, English, German, French and Dutch.
Some local British politicians want to become mayors of their Spanish towns.
"Some people think we are going to change the language of the town hall, but that is not true," said Jeff Wiszniewski, a 60-year-old former Scottish police officer. He founded the new Independent Party of the Nationalities (PIPN) to fight for the mayor's job in San Fulgencio, where British voters outnumber locals.
As in many towns where a wave of concrete swept over previously undeveloped countryside, both San Fulgencio and Rojales are split between the original old town and the vast new urbanizaciones – the foreign-dominated residential estates.
Wiszniewski rejected the idea of an "expats against locals" problem in San Fulgencio. But he complained that while the urbizaciones provided much of the town hall income, the money was mainly spent on the sleepy old town – which lies two miles away across a flat agricultural plain.
The deputy mayor, Mariano Martí, denied that the town, where asphalt spreading machines were this week giving streets a pre-electoral brush-up, was hogging resources. He admitted, however, that locals and foreigners barely mixed.
"They don't come down here to shop and people from the town don't go up there to go out," he said. "Language is a problem, because the waiters up there often only speak English."
Wisznieski admitted that his own faltering Spanish – though far better than that of most expats – was a potential problem at council meetings but said he would take a translator if necessary.
Martí said the job required someone who could represent the town in meetings with provincial authorities. "If he can't speak Spanish, then he can't defend the town's interests."
Not all Britons are keen to see a British mayor. "There might be one eventually," said Bob Harlow, a PP supporter in San Fulgencio. "But this is their country. It doesn't seem right for us to come and impose ourselves."
That may explains why only a quarter of 280,000 expat Europeans in Alicante have registered to vote. As a result only San Fulgencio and the village of Lliber, further north, have a majority of foreign voters.
Some expats privately admit it would be hypocritical to want to govern San Fulgencio, when immigration was one of the reasons they left Britain. And, indeed, Britain's own ethnic minorities are virtually invisible in San Fulgencio and Rojales.
Mainstream Spanish parties, having ignored expats in the past, are now working hard to attract European voters. "The British are key," said Marisun Prieto, a local PP strategist.
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