On July 23, the Spanish will go to the polls to choose the configuration of the Senate and the Congress of Deputies, which will in turn elect the next president or president of the Government. In the midst of the debates about the candidates and the coalitions with the most options, many do not understand how the Spanish electoral system works and the method for distributing seats in Parliament: the d’Hondt method.
Less than a month before the general elections, many do not understand how the electoral system works in Spain. And the criticisms against the d’Hondt method arise again, but how does this method that generates so much controversy work? where does it come from? And how are seats obtained and distributed in Spain?
Here are some keys to understanding the operation of the electoral process on July 23.
A parliamentary system of government
“Spain is a nation of nations”, was one of the phrases of Gregorio Peces-Barba, a politician from the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), after the approval of the Spanish Constitution in 1978, a text that shaped the laws of the transition he was experiencing Spain after four decades of dictatorship under the command of the military Francisco Franco.
The diversity of nationalities within the Spanish territory was one of the central themes of the Magna Carta, along with other aspects such as the rights and freedoms of citizens. After many political debates about how the Constitution should be, a fundamental point was agreed: the country would be a parliamentary monarchy. But what is a system? parliamentary monarchy?
In a parliamentary system, citizens do not directly elect their president. Through their vote, the population elects the members of the Congress of Deputies and the Senate. These parliamentarians represent the citizens in both Chambers and exercise politics in their name. But, in the case of Congress, the deputies have another key task: they are in charge of voting for the leader of the Government.
After receiving the confidence of Congress, the president chooses his government cabinet, made up of vice presidents and ministers. For this reason, the correct thing to do is to call the head of the Government ‘president of the Spanish Government’, and not ‘president of Spain’.
The parliamentary monarchy implies the existence of a head of government and a head of state. The king is the head of state and therefore also the leader of the Armed Forces and is the one who invests the president elected by Congress, but he has a rather symbolic function both in internal and external politics, than in practice. a representative figure of the country is recruited abroad.
The Spanish electoral system and the D’Hondt method
The Spanish Congress of Deputies has 350 benches or seats. How do you define your configuration? The answer lies in the national electoral system. In Spain, everything related to elections and the distribution of seats is regulated by the Organic Law of the General Electoral Regime (LOREG), approved in 1985 and modified in 2011.
The distribution is made according to the D’Hondt method, created at the end of the 19th century by the Belgian jurist Victor D’Hondt. And it is not a simple process. To get a seat in Spain, a certain number of votes is necessary, depending on the different regions. The country has 52 circumscriptions, one for each province, and each one has more or less reserved seats or deputies according to its population.
But the proportion is not perfect, since the mechanism favors the less populated constituencies. For example, in Madrid – the most populated area – more than 180,000 votes are needed to win a seat, while in Soria – the least populated area – only about 44,000. According to official sourcesthe 26 provinces with the fewest inhabitants have approximately 17.2% of the Spanish population, but elect 29% of the deputies.
When the count begins on election night, the first thing that is done, according to the D’Hondt method, is to discard the parties that do not reach a minimum of 3%. Afterwards, the seats are distributed only among the political formations that have obtained the highest number of votes.
For example, if a constituency has three seats, these are divided among the first three parties, even if the difference in votes between the third and fourth is very small. The system makes it easier to achieve majorities, but reduces representativeness by reducing the number of parties.
In addition, this method establishes that each party presents a closed list with its candidates for deputies, which means that citizens choose a list configured by the party and do not choose their representatives individually. For this reason, Spaniards vote more for a party -according to its ideology- and for its presidential candidate than for the deputies themselves.
If a party achieves an absolute majority in Congress – half plus one, 176 seats – it can govern alone. But, if he does not succeed, he needs to establish alliances until the Lower House endorses a presidential candidate by a simple majority. A clear example is that of the current government: the PSOE had to agree with United We Can to govern in 2020. Thus, it got 167 parliamentarians to vote in favor of investing Pedro Sánchez as president, compared to the 165 who voted against.
“In Spain, in short, the candidacy that has the most votes does not govern, but rather the set of forces that allows the assembly of a sufficient majority to overcome an investiture session that, depending on Parliament, an absolute majority or, just, is necessary. a simple majority”, maintains the journalist and political scientist Pablo de Cea, in an article of the communication medium Infobae.
A fair representation?
The D’Hondt system was devised during the Spanish democratic transition -between 1976 and 1977- to generate the aforementioned stable majorities, and for this reason it favors the most important parties and harms the minority ones at the national level. And that is precisely the main criticism of his detractors, who accuse him of being tailor-made for bipartisan systems.
“Although the Spanish system is defined as proportional, it has a high degree of disproportionality,” says Dieter Nohlen, PhD in Political Science from the University of Heidelberg to the Spanish newspaper ‘El Mundo’.
Others, such as the geopolitical analysis space Why Maps, assure that this method is not bad per se and that it promotes “governance”. However, every time Spain goes to elections it is at the center of controversy.
Historically, this method has benefited more the right -more united up to now- and has harmed the left -more fragmented-. Although in these elections the Spanish conservative forces are more divided.
In addition to the majority parties, there are other great beneficiaries of this system: the nationalist parties. If a party has its votes spread across several constituencies, it gets fewer seats than a party with a lot of support in a single province, as has historically happened with the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) in the Basque Country.
A practice that, according to the political scientist Pablo Simón, is no coincidence.
“This practice of the transition period, which seeks to design constituencies in such a way as to allow the government party to win the largest number of seats, is known in political science as ‘gerrymandering'” (in itself, a system created to give advantages to certain political parties in certain territories), Simón maintains before the medium ‘Damn’.
A method that is once again at the center of the controversy from each to 23J. And it seems that it will continue like this in the elections of the coming years. However, it is not a phenomenon exclusively in Spain. The D’Hondt is also used in other countries such as Argentina, France or Belgium.
