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Madrilenian parliamentary election, 1983

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8 May 1983
  
1987 →

Turnout
  
2,357,425 (69.7%)

25 January 1983
  
1983

Registered
  
3,381,610

14 December 1979
  
25 January 1983

51
  
34

Madrilenian parliamentary election, 1983

Winner
  
Joaquín Leguina

The 1983 Madrilenian parliamentary election was held on Sunday, 8 May 1983, to elect the 1st Assembly of Madrid, the regional legislature of the Spanish autonomous community of Madrid. All 94 seats in the Assembly were up for election. The election was held simultaneously with regional elections in 12 other autonomous communities and local elections all throughout Spain.

Contents

The election was won by the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), who won an absolute majority of seats and votes, the only occasion on which the party has achieved this in a Madrid Assembly election. In total the PSOE won 51 seats.

The People's Coalition, an electoral alliance led by the People's Alliance (AP), which also included the People's Democratic Party (PDP) and the Liberal Union (UL), emerged as the second largest grouping in the Assembly.

The Communist Party of Spain was the only other party to win seats in the Assembly. In 1986, the party joined with other left-wing movements to form the current United Left.

Electoral system

No electoral law was in force at the time, with election rules for the Assembly regulated under the electoral system for the Congress of Deputies and special provisions within the regional Statute of Autonomy. The Assembly of Madrid was elected using the D'Hondt method and a closed list proportional representation. Under the Statute, the Assembly was entitled to one member per each 50,000 inhabitants or fraction greater than 25,000, according to the most updated census data. As the updated population census for the 1983 election was the corresponding to year 1981 (4,686,695), the Assembly size was set to 94. All seats were allocated to a single multi-member district, with a threshold of 5% of valid votes—which included blank ballots—. Parties not reaching the threshold were not taken into consideration for the seat distribution.

Voting was on the basis of universal suffrage, with all residents over eighteen and in the full enjoyment of all political rights entitled to vote. Concurrently, residents meeting the previous criteria and not involved in any cause of ineligibility were eligible for the Assembly.

As per the Statute of Autonomy, the Assembly was to be automatically dissolved in the event of unsuccessful investiture attempts failing to elect a regional President within a two month-period from the first ballot, triggering a snap election. Elections were fixed for the fourth Sunday of May every four years, with early dissolutions not changing the period to the next ordinary election, meaning that elected deputies in a snap election merely served out what remained of their ordinary four-year parliamentary terms.

Opinion polls

Individual poll results are listed in the table below in reverse chronological order, showing the most recent first, and using the date the survey's fieldwork was done, as opposed to the date of publication. If such date is unknown, the date of publication is given instead. The highest percentage figure in each polling survey is displayed with its background shaded in the leading party's colour. In the instance of a tie, the figures with the highest percentages are shaded. in the case of seat projections, they are displayed in bold and in a different font. The lead column on the right shows the percentage-point difference between the two parties with the highest figures. 48 seats were required for an absolute majority in the Assembly of Madrid.

References

Madrilenian parliamentary election, 1983 Wikipedia