Spanish legislative election 2004: Encyclopedia II - Spanish legislative election 2004 - Results

Spanish legislative election 2004 - Results

In the Congress of Deputies, the PP vote fell by 6.9 percent, and the party lost 39 seats. The PSOE vote rose by 8.5 percent, bringing a gain of 35 seats. On the left, the United Left (a coalition led by the Communist Party of Spain), lost four of its nine seats, but the leftwing Catalan party Republican Left of Catalonia gained seven seats. The conservative Catalan nationalist party, Convergence and Unity, which in the recent past has been allied with the PP, lost five of its 15 seats.

The PSOE's victory was celebrated in the street outside the party's headquarters in Calle Ferraz with shouts of "No war!" and "How happy we are, to live without Aznar", but also "Zapatero, don't fail us!". Consistent with the PSOE's long-standing opposition to the Iraq war, Rodríguez Zapatero had promised during the election campaign to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq by June. Zapatero withdrew the troops shortly after taking office, a decision he justified on his belief that the United Nations was not likely to assume responsibility for Iraq after the U.S.-led occupation formally ended at the end of June, which was his criterion for allowing troops to stay. Subsequent events, indeed, bore out his prediction.

A feature of the result was the increased representation for the Republican Left of Catalonia, a minor left-wing party which has formed a coalition government with the PSOE in Catalonia. The Republican Left's leader, Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, had recently held meetings with the Basque separatist group ETA in France, a revelation which had forced his exit from the recently formed Catalan regional government and had become a campaign issue in the general election.

Spanish legislative election 2004 - Development of voteshares and seats

Source: Spanish Interior Ministry

• The Gallagher/Lijphart index of disproportionality for the election is 5.20
• The effective number of elective parties is 3.04
• The effective number of parliamentary parties is 2.49

Spanish legislative election 2004 - Senate

In the Senate the PP won 102 seats to the PSOE's 81, a better result than in the lower house. Even so, this was a 28-seat gain for the PSOE and a 25-seat loss for the PP. In Catalonia, a combined Socialist-Republican left ticket won 12 Senate seats, and the Basque Nationalists won six.

Senate seats by Autonomous Community and Constituency

The PSOE and its Catalan affiliate the PSC-ERC thus has 93 seats to the PP's 102. The rest of the nationalist parties, Catalan CiU, Basque EAJ-PNV, and Canary Islands CC are all conservative parties. Even if the six Basque Nationalists (EAJ-PNV), which are strongly at odds with the PP, vote with the left, the PP will still outvote them. The PSOE will thus need to gain the support of the Catalan and Canary Islands regionalists, the CiU and CC, to carry legislation in the Senate. Both parties have supported PSOE and PP governments in 1990-2000, when the largest party did not enjoy an absolute majority in the Congress.

It is possible that voters swung to the PSOE in the vote for the Congress of Deputies, which determines the government, but stuck with the PP in the voting for the Senate, thus placing a brake on a future socialist government. However, a swing in votes that fails to change who leads in a district has a larger effect in the Congress, with large numbers of seats per constituency allocated proportionally, that in the Senate, where constituencies elect up to four representatives and voters cast votes for up to three people (usually all from the same party).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Results", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki