13 June 1999 2003 → 26 September 1993 8 April 1999 42 seats, 42.8% 32 seats, 34.0% | Registered 3,361,989 7.4% 8 April 1999 1997 | |
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Turnout 2,279,805 (67.8%)
8.2 pp Winner Eduardo Zaplana | ||
The 1999 Valencian parliamentary election was held on Sunday, 13 June 1999, to elect the 5th 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, as well as the 1999 European Parliament election.
The People's Party (PP), which had ruled the community from 1995 in a coalition government, won an absolute majority of seats; majority which it would maintain for the next 20 years. Its coalition partner, Valencian Union (UV), fell just below the 5% threshold, resulting in it losing all seats and being expelled from the Courts. The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) remained static on its 1995 vote share, though it gained 3 additional seats thanks to United Left (IU) electoral collapse from 10 to 5 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 1999 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.