The most voted list does not govern in the municipalities where one in four Spaniards reside

Would the municipal political landscape change a lot if Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s proposal that the most voted list should govern yes or yes were applied? Yes, and the PP would not have been the most benefited four years ago. 471 municipalities throughout Spain with more than 250 inhabitants have a mayor who did not win the elections. They do not seem like many compared to the more than 5,291 municipalities with that number of citizens registered. That is, 9% of the total. But that half thousand urban centers bring together almost a quarter of the entire population: more than 11 million inhabitants, 24% of Spaniards. And the party that governs the most people at the municipal level without having been the winner at the polls is precisely the PP.

This is clear from the analysis carried out by elDiario.es of the data crossing of the 2019 municipal elections and the mayors who currently govern a few months after the Spaniards are called back to the polls. Some elections for which the PP has proposed a modification of the law to guarantee that the list with the most votes governs in the cities that, in reality, has been discarded on the fly by the other formations, but also by prominent leaders of the right, like Isabel Diaz Ayuso.

These data only include municipalities with more than 250 inhabitants, since below that number the electoral system is semi-open and there is no “most voted list.” In addition, there are 11 cases that the most voted list does not govern because the mayor appears as “not attached.” That is to say, they have left the municipal political group, for example, due to defecting or accusations.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s idea is not new, the PP has raised it repeatedly in the past, but has never applied it when it has had the option to do so. Neither in the form of a change in the regulations, for which they claim to want the consensus of the PSOE, nor as their own decision to implement unilaterally.

In fact, the old bipartisanship is the most benefited when it comes to taking over mayoralties in which they have not won the elections. PP and PSOE govern 244 municipalities of the 471 with more than 250 inhabitants in which this circumstance occurs, a little more than half.

The Socialists are the ones that have achieved the most number of mayors despite not winning the elections: 151. On the other side of the scale, the PSOE does not govern in 132 localities where it did win. The PP, for its part, runs 93 municipalities without being the first force, and stopped doing so in 175.

But if we transform these numbers into population, the ranking turns around: the PP rules over 4,694,626 people who live in towns where it did not win, compared to 2,573,510 for the PSOE. The balance for those of Feijóo is very positive if the inhabitants of the cities that were taken from them by a pact of those who did not win are subtracted: 2,000,472. For the PSOE, it is 447,067 people.

If Feijóo’s proposal to automatically govern the most voted list were applied, millions of Spaniards would become governed by other parties. For example, the three million inhabitants who live in Madrid would have a mayor from Más Madrid. Or the million and a half inhabitants of Barcelona would have an ERC candidate as councilor.

Also, 2.1 million Spaniards would be led by a socialist mayor to a popular one. And vice versa, a million residents would go from having a consistory led by the PP to a socialist councilor. The following graph shows this flow of residents according to who is the current mayor and who would be if the list with the most votes governed.

The circumstance occurs that the two most populated cities in Spain are in the hands of forces that did not win the elections. It was the case of Madrid and Barcelona. In the capital, Más Madrid prevailed in 2019, with almost 31% of the vote, well ahead of the PP. But a pact between José Luis Martínez-Almeida with Ciudadanos and Vox took the Mayor’s Office from Manuel Carmena. Now, with the polls in favor, Almeida defends a legal reform that would have deprived him of being mayor of Madrid.

In Barcelona Ada Colau did not win the 2019 elections, which went to ERC. But a pact with the PSC and the vote of Manuel Valls (an almost accidental candidate for Ciudadanos) allowed him to maintain power.

More Madrid is, thus, the party most affected numerically. On the contrary, Barcelona en Comú would be the most benefited. In both cases their casuistry is reduced to a single city, but highly populated.

Situations similar to those of Madrid and Barcelona occur in other large cities (more than 150,000 inhabitants). In Zaragoza, the current PP candidate for the Government of Aragon took control of the autonomous capital despite not winning. The same happened in Murcia (PSOE against PP), A Coruña (PSOE against PP), Badalona (PSC against PP), Cartagena (PP against MC Cartagena), La Laguna (PSOE against Coalición Canaria) and Badajoz ( Citizens against PSOE).

There are also cases, the least, in which although the most voted list does not have the mayoralty, it does form part of the municipal government. This is the case in Melilla (Ciudadanos and PP), Ciudad Real (mayor of Ciudadanos and PSOE – the most voted list – also in the Government) or Arrecife (the PP is deputy mayor and the Canary Coalition is in the mayor’s office).

There are also paradigmatic cases, such as Ourense, where the PP preferred to give the Mayorship to the third party as long as the winner, the PSOE, did not govern.

On 28M the Spanish are called to the polls to elect their municipal governments. And it will be done as it has been done since the restoration of democracy: with pacts that add up to the majority of the plenary session. Otherwise, the law already provides that the most voted list will govern. A week after presenting his proposal with all the pageantry where the first Constitution was approved, in 1812, no one in the PP has insisted on Feijóo’s plan.

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