Madrid City Council election, 2003

← 1999

25 May 2003

2007 →

All 55 seats in the Madrid City Council
28 seats needed for a majority

Opinion polls

Registered

2,484,328

0.2%

Turnout

1,711,613 (68.9%)

8.9 pp

	First party	Second party	Third party

Leader	Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón	Trinidad Jiménez	Inés Sabanés
Party	PP	PSOE	IUCM
Leader since	16 October 2002	2 June 2002	23 June 1998
Leader's seat	Madrid	Madrid	Madrid
Last election	28 seats, 49.5%	20 seats, 36.0%	5 seats, 8.7%
Seats won	30	21	4
Seat change	2	1	1
Popular vote	874,264	625,148	123,015
Percentage	51.3%	36.7%	7.2%
Swing	1.8 pp	0.7 pp	1.5 pp

Mayor before election

José María Álvarez del Manzano
PP

Elected Mayor

Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón
PP

José María Álvarez del Manzano
PP

Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón
PP

The 2003 Madrid City Council election was held on Sunday, 25 May 2003, to elect the city council of the municipality of Madrid. All 55 seats in the City Council were up for election.

The People's Party (PP) under President of the Community of Madrid Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, who was succeeding the retiring José María Álvarez del Manzano, managed to revert the near-tie situation predicted by opinion polls between his party and the PSOE-IU bloc. Gallardón went on to win a comfortable absolute majority both in votes and seats, reverting the 1999 result in which it had seemed that party's support had begun to decline. The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) under Trinidad Jiménez obtained its best result since it was ousted from power in 1989, despite it not being enough to recover the mayoralty. United Left (IU) continued on its long-term decline and lost another seat, scoring its worst result since 1987.

A remarkable event for this election was that both main parties' contenders (Ruiz-Gallardón and Jiménez) were cousins, despite belonging to opposing parties.

The number of seats in the Madrid City Council was determined by the population count. According to the municipal electoral law, the population-seat relationship on each municipality was to be established on the following scale:

Additionally, for populations greater than 100,000, 1 seat was to be added per each 100,000 inhabitants or fraction, according to the most updated census data, and adding 1 more seat if the resulting seat count gives an even number. As the updated population census for the 2003 election was 3,016,788, the Madrid City Council size was set to 55 seats.

...
Wikipedia