26 May 1991 1995 → 31 July 1979 15 December 1990 42 seats, 41.3% 25 seats, 24.7% | Registered 2,916,465 6.9% 15 December 1990 1991 Start date May 26, 1991 | |
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Turnout 2,019,411 (69.2%)
5.3 pp Winner Joan Lerma | ||
The 1991 Valencian parliamentary election was held on Sunday, 26 May 1991, to elect the 3rd democratically elected Corts Valencianes, the regional legislature of the Spanish autonomous community of the Land of Valencia. All 89 seats in the Corts were up for election. The election was held simultaneously with regional elections in 12 other autonomous communities and local elections all throughout Spain.
For the third and final time to date, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) won a regional election in the Valencian Community, regaining the overall majority of seats it had lost in the 1987 election. This was the last time the PSOE was able to access the Valencian government on its own, and the last until the 2015 election in which it went on to form the regional government of the Valencian Community.
As in other Spanish communities, the Democratic and Social Centre (CDS) saw a substantial drop in its vote share, causing it to fall below the 5% threshold and lose all its 10 seats. The party's poor results across Spain led to the resignation of party leader and former Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez and to the eventual demise of the CDS as a relevant actor in Spanish politics.
The main right of centre parties, both the newly founded People's Party (PP) (a merger of the People's Alliance (AP) and other right-wing parties) and the regionalist Valencian Union (UV), came out reinforced from the election, mainly at the cost of the declining CDS. However, they were left unable to command an overall majority of seats, unlike what happened in the city of Valencia in the same year's election, in which a post-election agreement between both parties managed to oust the PSOE from the city's government and elect 1987 AP regional candidate Rita Barberá as city mayor.
United Left (IU) maintained the results obtained by the IU-UPV alliance in the 1987 election. Valencian People's Unity (UPV) had broken its alliance with IU in 1988 and was left out of the Courts as a result, being unable to surpass the 5% regional threshold to win seats.
Electoral system
The number of seats in the Corts Valencianes was set to a fixed-number of 89. All Courts members were elected in 3 multi-member districts, corresponding to the Valencian Community's three 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 29 seats allocated among the three provinces in proportion to their populations, on the required condition that the number of inhabitants per seat in each district did not exceed 3 times those of any other. For the 1991 election, seats were distributed as follows: Alicante (30), Castellon (22) and Valencia (37).
Voting was on the basis of universal suffrage in a secret ballot. Only lists polling above 5% of valid votes in all of the community (which include blank ballots—for none of the above) were entitled to enter the seat distribution. This meant that in the case a list polled above 5% in one or more of the districts but below 5% in the community totals, it would remain outside of the seat apportionment.