25 May 2003 2007 → Turnout 666,468 (75.6%)
2.2 pp 13 October 2000 1 October 1995 | Registered 881,228 0.5% 20 December 1982 13 October 2000 34 seats, 49.6% 28 seats, 40.0% | |
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The 2003 Extremaduran parliamentary election was held on Sunday, 25 May 2003, to elect the 6th Assembly of Extremadura, the unicameral regional legislature of the Spanish autonomous community of Extremadura. At stake were all 65 seats in the Assembly, determining the President of Extremadura.
The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), which in this election ran in coalition with the Extremaduran Coalition, enlarged its absolute majority from 34 to 36 seats, at the cost of the opposition People's Party (PP), which fell to 26 and lost ground for the first time since the 1987 election. United Left (IU), which formed a coalition with the Independent Socialists of Extremadura (SIEx), maintained its 3 seats but was unable to make gains.
Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra was elected for his sixth and last term in office as President of Extremadura, as he would announce in September 2006 he would not stand for re-election in 2007.
Electoral system
The number of seats in the Extremaduran Assembly was set to a fixed-number of 65. All Assembly members were elected in 2 multi-member districts, corresponding to Extremadura's two provinces, using the D'Hondt method and a closed-list proportional representation system. Each district was entitled to an initial minimum of 20 seats, with the remaining 25 seats allocated among the two provinces in proportion to their populations. For the 2003 election, seats were distributed as follows: Badajoz (35) and Cáceres (30).
Voting was on the basis of universal suffrage in a secret ballot. Only lists polling above 5% of valid votes in each district (which include blank ballots—for none of the above) were entitled to enter the seat distribution. Alternatively, however, if a party did not reach the 5% threshold in a district, it could enter the seat distribution on the following conditions: