April 2019 Spanish general election
A general election was held in Spain on Sunday, 28 April 2019, to elect the members of the 13th Cortes Generales under the Spanish Constitution of 1978. All 350 seats in the Congress of Deputies were up for election, as well as 208 of 266 seats in the Senate. It was held concurrently with a regional election in the Valencian Community.
Following the 2016 election, the People's Party formed a minority government with confidence and supply support from Citizens and Canarian Coalition, enabled by the opposition Spanish Socialist Workers' Party abstaining from Mariano Rajoy's investiture after a party crisis saw the ousting of Pedro Sánchez as leader. Rajoy's second term in office was undermined by a constitutional crisis over the Catalan independence issue and the outcome of a regional election held thereafter, coupled with corruption scandals, the 2018 Spanish women's strike and pensioners' protests demanding pension hikes. In May 2018, the National Court found that the PP had profited from the kickbacks-for-contracts scheme in the Gürtel case and confirmed the existence of an illegal accounting and funding structure. Sánchez, who had been re-elected as PSOE leader in a party primary in 2017, brought down Rajoy's government through a motion of no confidence on 1 June 2018. Rajoy subsequently resigned as PP leader, being succeeded by Pablo Casado after a face-off with Rajoy's deputy, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, in a leadership contest in July.
Presiding over a minority government of 84 deputies, Pedro Sánchez struggled to maintain a working majority in the Congress with the support of the parties that had backed the no-confidence motion. The 2018 Andalusian regional election, which saw a strong performance of the far-right Vox party, resulted in the PSOE losing the regional government for the first time in history to a PP–Cs–Vox alliance. After the 2019 General State Budget was voted down in the Congress as a result of Republican Left of Catalonia and Catalan European Democratic Party siding against the government, Sánchez called a snap election to be held on 28 April, one month ahead of the "Super Sunday" of local, regional, and European Parliament elections scheduled for 26 May.
On a voter turnout of 71.8%, Sánchez's PSOE won a victory—the first for the party in a nationwide election in eleven years—with an improvement of 38 seats over its previous mark which mostly came at the expense of left-wing Unidas Podemos. The PSOE also became the largest party in the Senate for the first time since 1995, winning its first absolute majority of seats in that chamber since the 1989 election. The PP under Casado was reduced to 66 seats and 16.7% of the vote in what was dubbed the worst electoral setback for a major Spanish party since the collapse of the Union of the Democratic Centre in 1982, and which was blamed to the party's shift to the right during the campaign. Cs saw an increase of support which brought them within striking distance of the PP, overcoming the latter in several major regions. The far-right Vox party entered Congress for the first time, but it failed to fulfill opinion polling expectations. The three-way split in the overall right-of-centre vote not only ended any chance of an Andalusian-inspired right-wing alliance, but it also ensured that Sánchez's PSOE would be the only party that could realistically form a government.
Background
The 2016 general election had seen the People's Party gaining votes and seats relative to the 2015 election, with Mariano Rajoy securing the support of Albert Rivera's Citizens and Canarian Coalition for his investiture, but this was still not enough to assure him re-election as prime minister. Criticism on Spanish Socialist Workers' Party leader Pedro Sánchez for his electoral performance and his stance opposing Rajoy's investiture, said to be a contributing factor to the country's political deadlock, reached boiling point after poor showings in the Basque and Galician regional elections in September 2016. A PSOE crisis ensued in which Sánchez was ousted and a caretaker committee was appointed by party rebels led by Andalusian president Susana Díaz, who subsequently set out to abstain in Rajoy's investiture, allowing the formation of a PP minority government and preventing a third election in a row. Díaz's bid to become new party leader was defeated in a primary in May 2017, with Sánchez being voted again into office under a platform focused on criticising the PSOE's abstention to Rajoy.Throughout 2017, the ruling PP found itself embroiled in a new string of scandals which saw the political demise of former Madrilenian president Esperanza Aguirre—amid claims of a corruption plot staged by former protégés Francisco Granados and Ignacio González —as well as accusations of judicial meddling and political cover-up. This prompted left-wing Unidos Podemos under Pablo Iglesias to table a no-confidence motion in June 2017; while the motion was voted down due to a lack of support from other opposition parties, it revealed the parliamentary weakness of Rajoy's government as abstentions and favourable votes amounted to 179, to just 170 votes rejecting it.
File:Rajoy anuncia elecciones en Cataluña 06.jpg|thumb|left|alt=Mariano Rajoy giving a press conference in La Moncloa|Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announcing the enforcement of direct rule over Catalonia on 27 October 2017, in the wake of the constitutional crisis sparked by an attempt to enforce unilateral independence.
Pressure on the Spanish government increased after a major constitutional crisis unravelled in Catalonia over the issue of an independence referendum. Initial actions from the regional parliament to approve two bills supporting a referendum and a legal framework for an independent Catalan state were suspended by the Constitutional Court, while the government's crackdown on referendum preparations—which included police searches, raids and arrests of Catalan government officials as well as an intervention into Catalan finances—sparked public outcry and protests accusing the PP government of "anti-democratic and totalitarian" repression. After the referendum was held on 1 October 2017, the Catalan parliament voted to unilaterally declare independence from Spain, which resulted in the Spanish Senate enforcing direct rule over Catalonia and removing the regional authorities. Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and part of his cabinet fled to Belgium after being ousted, facing charges of sedition, rebellion and embezzlement. Rajoy immediately dissolved the Catalan parliament and called a regional election for 21 December 2017, but it saw his party being severely mauled as Cs capitalised on anti-independence support in the region.
The outcome of the Catalan election had an impact on national politics, with Cs rising to first place nationally in subsequent opinion polls, endangering PP's position as the dominant party within the Spanish centre-right spectrum. The standing of Rajoy's government was further undermined by the success of the 2018 Spanish women's strike on International Women's Day ; by protests by pensioners' groups—long regarded as a key component of the PP's electoral base—demanding pension hikes; as well as by a scandal over the alleged fraudulent acquisition of a master's degree from the King Juan Carlos University by Madrilenian president Cristina Cifuentes, which escalated further after the unveiling of a plot to cover-up the scandal through the forgery of public instruments. Rajoy forced Cifuentes's resignation on 25 April 2018, following the release of a 2011 video that showed her being detained in a supermarket for shoplifting.
File:Mariano Rajoy felicita al nuevo presidente del Gobierno Pedro Sánchez.jpg|thumb|alt=Mariano Rajoy and Pedro Sánchez shaking hands in the Congress of Deputies|The outgoing prime minister Rajoy congratulating the incoming prime minister Pedro Sánchez upon losing the no confidence vote on 1 June 2018.
On 24 May 2018, the National Court found that the PP had profited from the illegal kickbacks-for-contracts scheme of the Gürtel case, confirming the existence of an illegal accounting and funding structure that had run in parallel with the party's official one since 1989, ruling that the PP helped establish "a genuine and effective system of institutional corruption through the manipulation of nationwide, regional and local public procurement". This event prompted the PSOE to submit a motion of no confidence in Rajoy, as well as in Cs withdrawing its support from the government and demanding the immediate calling of an early election. An absolute majority of 180 MPs in the Congress of Deputies voted to oust Mariano Rajoy from power on 1 June 2018, with PSOE's Pedro Sánchez replacing him as prime minister. On 5 June, Rajoy announced his farewell from politics and his return to his position as property registrar in Santa Pola, also vacating his Congress seat. A leadership contest was triggered in which the party's communication deputy secretary-general Pablo Casado defeated former deputy prime minister Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, becoming new PP president on 21 July 2018.
For most of his first tenure, Sánchez's minority government—commanding just 84 out of 350 deputies in the Congress—was reliant on confidence and supply support from Unidos Podemos and New Canaries, negotiating additional support from Republican Left of Catalonia, the Catalan European Democratic Party and the Basque Nationalist Party on an issue-by-issue basis. Sánchez's attempts to distance himself from corruption scandals during Rajoy's government saw the resignations of two ministers: Màxim Huerta, after just seven days in office, over revelations that he had committed tax fraud through shell companies in 2006–2008; and Carmen Montón in September 2018, over the unveiling of several past irregularities—including plagiarism, manipulated grades and lack of class attendance—in his master's degree at the King Juan Carlos University, but not before being able to restore the right to universal health care for all Spanish citizens and foreign residents. Amid Sánchez's attempts at reconciliation with Catalan authorities under new regional president Quim Torra, his party lost the Andalusian government at the December 2018 regional election—after 36 years in power—to a right-wing alliance supported by the far-right Vox party, which for the first time secured parliamentary representation in Spain.
ERC, PDeCAT and En Marea withdrew their support from the government on 13 February 2019 by voting down that year's General State Budget; this, together with the perceived failure of a street protest strategy by PP, Cs and Vox against the government's appeasement policy to Catalan parties, prompted Sánchez to dissolve parliament and call a snap election for 28 April.