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The Autonomous Community of Galicia will hold a parliamentary election on Sunday, July 12, 2020. An overview of the Galician proportional representation electoral system is presented here.
In addition, autonomous community- and provincial-level results are available here (and also in CSV format) for the following Galician autonomic parliamentary elections:
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The election statistics presented in this space come from results published by the Galicia Board of Elections and the Eleccións 2016 ao Parlamento de Galicia website.
Spanish legislative election results for Galicia are available in
Elections to the Spanish Congress of Deputies.
For information about the electoral system of the Autonomous Community of
Euskadi, which will also hold an autonomic election on Sunday, July 12, 2020,
visit Elections to the Basque Parliament.
General Aspects of the Electoral System
The Galician Parliament consists of a single house, composed of 75 members directly elected by universal adult suffrage for a four-year term of office. Each one of Galicia's four provinces - A Coruña, Lugo, Ourense (Orense) and Pontevedra - is a constituency entitled to an initial minimum of ten seats; the remaining 35 seats are distributed among the four provinces in proportion to their population.
In the election held in 2016, parliamentary seats were allocated in the following manner:
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Otherwise, the Galician electoral system is almost identical to the system used to choose members of the Spanish Congress of Deputies. As such, parties, federations, coalitions and agrupaciones de electores (electors' groups) present closed lists of candidates; electors then cast a ballot for a single list; and seats in each constituency are apportioned according to the largest average method of proportional representation (PR) - the d'Hondt rule - among lists receiving at least five percent of all valid votes cast in the constituency (three percent before 1993), including blank ballots.
It should be pointed out that the Galician electoral system favors the sparsely populated provinces of Lugo and Ourense at the expense of A Coruña and Pontevedra. For example, in the 2005 parliamentary election, the smallest quotient used to allocate seats was 14,456 votes in Lugo, but in A Coruña the same figure rose to 26,025 votes. It should noted as well that the five percent barrier is relevant only in A Coruña and Pontevedra: in Lugo and Ourense, the d'Hondt rule creates a de facto representation threshold which is slightly larger than the barrier set forth by law.
The Popular Party (PP) - Spain's major right-of-center party, originally known as the Popular Alliance (AP) - has been Galicia's dominant political force since 1981, when it scored an upset victory over the Union of the Democratic Center (UCD), the moderate party that ruled Spain from 1977 to 1982. PP, which has won the largest number of seats in every election to the Parliament of Galicia, ruled the autonomous community from 1982 until 1987 (when a no-confidence motion brought down the minority government of Xerardo Fernández Albor), from 1990 to 2005 (when AP founder Manuel Fraga Iribarne headed the autonomous government), and again since 2009, under the leadership of Alberto Núñez Feijoo.
The Galician party system has been characterized as well by the presence of nationalist parties that compete with Spain's major statewide parties, although Galician nationalists have never enjoyed an electoral following as broad as that of their counterparts in Catalonia and the Basque Country. Nonetheless, since 1993 the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG) has captured a substantial number of votes and seats in elections to the Galician Parliament, and the left-wing nationalist coalition has alternated in second place with the Party of Galician Socialists (PSdeG), the Galician branch of PSOE.
While PSdeG has never won a parliamentary election in Galicia, the party has held power on two occasions: from 1987 to 1990, when then-Socialist leader Fernando González Laxe ruled in alliance with the Galician Coalition (CG; a moderate nationalist party established by former Galician UCD leaders after the centrist party's dissolution in 1983), the Galician Nationalist Party (PNG; a CG breakaway) and AP dissidents; and from 2005 to 2009, when PSdeG leader Emilio Pérez Touriño formed a coalition government with BNG, after PP lost by a single seat the absolute majority it held in the Galician Parliament since 1989 (which the latter recovered in 2009, once again by a one-seat margin).
- Election Resources on the Internet: Spain
- The Galician Parliament, in Galician and Spanish
Copyright © 2009-2020 Manuel
Álvarez-Rivera. All Rights Reserved.
Last update: July 7, 2020.