The 2019 Spanish Election Maps

The centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) have emerged as the main winners in yesterday's national election in Spain. The party took 28.7% and won the most seats (123 seats, an increase of 38 seats from 2016). The biggest losers were the corruption hit centre-right People's Party (PP), who lost about half of their voters. The PP only managed to win 66 seats (down from 135 seats in 2016).

You can explore the results for yourself on El Pais' 2019 General Election map. The map reveals that the PSOE were popular throughout much of the country and that the PP lost votes nearly everywhere, but most dramatically in the south and east of the country. The PP were the most successful party in the last election in 2016, however the party has been damaged by corruption scandals and by its handling of the Catalan independence issue.


Last week El Pais published an interactive map of the 2016 Spanish Election. The image above shows the 2016 (left) and 2019 (right) election maps side-by-side. This map clearly shows how the PP lost ground throughout central Spain and how the PSOE has spread from its traditional southern stronghold to capture most of Spain.

The fall of the centre-right PP also resulted in a rise in seats for the centre-right Citizens party and the far-right Vox party. The Citizens party won 57 seats (a rise of 25) and for the first time Vox picked up 24 seats (0 seats in 2016).

Despite the huge rise in support for the centre-left PSOE they still remain short of the 176 seats they need for a working majority. The party will therefore need to rely on the support of the Unidas Podemos party (42 seats) and some of the smaller regional and nationalist parties to form a government.


After the midterm U.S. elections last year many interactive maps used directional arrows to visualize the swing in votes towards either the Democrats or the Republicans. El Diaro has created a similar directional arrow map for the 2019 Spanish election which shows where Spain has moved to the left or right since the 2016 election.

If you click on the 'Por Bloques' tab above the El Diaro interactive map and then select the 'Variación sobre 2016' map you can view an arrow map showing where the vote swung left or right in this election. The map reveals a huge swing to left-wing parties in the north-west regions of Spain, along the Mediterranean coast and in Madrid. There seems to have been a swing to right-wing parties in the south of Spain, but these swings appear very small compared to the larger swing to the left elsewhere in Spain.


The only map I can find which provides a breakdown of where people voted for the extreme right Vox party is on Reddit. This map shows the percentage of votes cast for Vox in each constituency area (you can view the percentage of votes cast for all of the parties in each constituency on Wikipedia).

The two dots underneath Spain on the map are the two Spanish autonomous cities of Ceuta and Mililla, both of which are situated on the north coast of Africa. Cueta recorded the highest percentage (24%) of the electorate voting for Vox in the whole of Spain. Melilla recorded the fourth highest percentage vote (16.9%). Morocco believes that sovereignty of Ceuta and Melilla should be transferred to Morocco. This may be one reason why voters in the two cities voted in such high numbers for a nationalist party like Vox. Other constituencies which voted in higher percentages for Vox than the rest of Spain were: Alemeira (19.2%) and Murcia (18.6%) on the south-east coast, and Toledo (16.9%) and Guadalajara (16.5%) in the Castilla–La Mancha region of Spain.

The areas which showed the least support for Vox are all in the Basque Country and Catalonia. You could argue that voters there voted for their own Nationalist parties. However it is probably more accurate to say that Vox's opposition to Basque and Catalan autonomy proved particularly unpopular to voters in these two regions.