The cliché goes that any political change in Spain is preceded by an upheaval in municipal elections. This was the case in 1931, when the left’s victory in the town halls paved the way for the Second Republic. It also happened with the PSOE’s triumph in the first municipal elections after Franco’s death: in 1979 it foreshadowed what would happen in 1982, when Felipe González won 202 seats, and in 1995 a sweeping PP result was the unmistakable signal of Aznar’s victory the following year.
In the spring of 2023, the PP won the municipal elections, securing more than seven million votes and gaining 3,084 council seats, while the PSOE finished about 700,000 votes behind the PP and lost 1,557 elected posts. Sánchez’s show of force by immediately calling general elections afterward helped the Socialist leader clinch—in extremis—a investiture that seemed impossible, but the maxim “who wins the municipal elections wins the next general elections” was fulfilled once again.
Today, the PP controls the municipal government in 31 of the 52 provincial capitals and autonomous cities of Spain, compared with 12 for the PSOE and PSC. The PNV has two, and the remaining cities are divided among the BNG, Coalición Canaria, Democracia Ourensana, Izquierda Unida, EH Bildu, the CUP and Por Ávila.
Vox is part of several municipal governments in coalition with the PP, but it does not control any capital, and Sumar has a negligible presence on the map of Spain’s local power.
The recent municipal elections in France and the United Kingdom have shown that traditional forces have an advantage in local elections by virtue of more developed party structures and bases of militants than other rising forces on the right and left. Perhaps that lesson could incline Pedro Sánchez to call a ‘super Sunday’ on May 23, 2027. However, the judicial horizon that constrains him and the unpredictability of his circumstances make it impossible to know whether he will be able to maintain his aim of completing the legislative term in the summer of 2027. If not, he will be forced to call elections earlier, as his nearly 2,300 mayors across Spain fear that voters, as happened in May 2023, will hand them the bill for the government’s erratic course.
The PP is today Spain’s main municipal political force, boasting 3,300 mayors, about a thousand more than the PSOE, and it governs eight of the ten largest Spanish cities; only the second city, Barcelona, and the ninth, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, are in the hands of the PSOE.
The worst for the PSOE is that, eleven months before local elections, nothing suggests a turnaround that would allow it to regain ground. Only Valencia seems to be in dispute, though more in favor of Compromís than the PSOE. By contrast, in Las Palmas the mayoralty of former socialist minister Carolina Darias is at risk due to the highly probable surge of Vox in the plenary of the Canarian capital.
“Traditional forces have an advantage in municipal elections by possessing more developed structures and bases of militants”
Between the May 2023 municipal elections and the general elections later that year, Sánchez managed to add 1.5 million votes, versus just over a million for the PP. In that arithmetic, Sánchez hopes to win again in the upcoming general elections, but if the PSOE suffers another collapse in the municipal elections, a comeback will be impossible.
The PSOE is currently a party with a very weakened base. A municipal result that turns it into a giant with feet of clay, or into an inverted pyramid—with substantial national power but little local strength—would make it virtually impossible for Sánchez to repeat the 2023 scenario. The socialist leadership would do well to look to France, where a project like Macron’s never achieved territorial foothold, and that has ended up weighing down the presidency of the now-outgoing president.
