OTL Election maps resources thread

Electoral map for Sweden
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This was my attempt to map the 1960 South African republic referendum by (geographical) constituency, rather than simply by province. However, as I cannot for the life of me find even a single constituency map of South Africa during the apartheid era, hexagons had to do.
Information from Parlementêre verkiesings in Suid-Afrika 1910-1976. Green is for republic, red is against.

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Sorry for the old quote but.... *ZERO*? I was thinking of making a very similar map and it's upsetting to know there's literally no resources on the net.
 
Way back on the second page of this thread, someone posted maps of the first three Spanish elections after the transition to democracy, but they didn’t include margins of victory or write-ups, so I thought I would give it a go myself (partly because I’ve been so impressed by the write-ups by psephologists on and outside of this forum like Nanwe and the people behind AJRElectionMaps). I should be clear Spanish politics isn’t necessarily my area of expertise, so if people want to make corrections, they’re very welcome to.

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The story of the 1977 Spanish election starts with the Spanish transition to democracy, which began with the death of Francisco Franco, the Caudillo (Head of State) of Spain for the last 39 years, and his succession by Prince Juan Carlos as the first King of Spain since Alfonso XIII abdicated at the start of the Second Republican period. Despite Juan Carlos pledging to continue the principles of corporatist fascism of the National Movement (Movimiento Nacional, MN) that Franco had led, it quickly became clear this was untenable given the intense tensions in Spanish society and the advocacy of liberal capitalists both inside and outside of Spain. Juan Carlos knew this, and consequently started to plan to push reforms through the Cortes Españolas (meaning Spanish Courts, the 'parliament' that formed the legislature of Francoist Spain).

Despite this, Juan Carlos left in place the incumbent head of government, Carlos Arias Navarro. This was anything but conductive to his aims, as Arias Navarro was a hardline opponent of liberalisation and wanted his government to continue Francoism through democracia a la española (‘democracy in the Spanish way’- comparisons to ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ are fairly apt). Despite this, the government adopted the reform programme that Second Deputy Prime Minister (and future founder of the People’s Party) Manuel Fraga proposed, which sought to reform the Francoist Fundamental Laws of the Realm to create a liberal democracy in Spain. To try to satisfy both the far-right búnker and the democratic opponents of Francoism, it was decided the reform process would legalise opposition political parties, with one predictable exception (the Communists, or Partido Comunista de España, PCE) and would leave the parties outside the MN out of the reform process.

The reform process passed one part on the 25th May 1976, which legalized public demonstrations, but on the 11th June it fell apart after the Cortes added a wrecking amendment to the Criminal Code reform banning organisations that ‘submitted to an international discipline’ and ‘advocated for the implantation of a totalitarian regime’ (just so long as it wasn’t the party that Franco fellow had created). This was the last straw for Juan Carlos and the reformers, and Arias Navarro was dismissed.

His replacement was Adolfo Suárez, who had made a speech in support of the Law of Political Associations asserting that ‘if Spain is plural, the Cortes cannot afford to deny it’. This passionate advocacy for Spanish democracy was a key part of why Juan Carlos picked him, even though Suárez’s Francoist past made him no ally of the left or centre. Regardless, Suárez managed to unite the Cortes and get the Law for Political Reform (Ley para la Reforma Política) passed, before holding a referendum in which 94% of voters supported it. He also built bridges with the opposition slowly, issuing a political amnesty that freed 400 prisoners, replacing the Tribunal de Orden Público with the Audencia Nacional (greatly undercutting the Francoist secret police) and, in March and April 1977, granting the rights to strike and unionise. Finally, and most relevant to our purposes, he also introduced the Ley Electoral, which created the framework for the modern Spanish electoral system that largely remains in place to this day.

Suárez also achieved positive relations with Felipe González, the secretary general of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE), the main socialist party in Spain. The PSOE quickly started to moderate its politics as the transition went on, with González visiting Juan Carlos and the party declaring its support for a Cortes election. More troublesome was trying to iron things out with the PCE, both with military leaders (who opposed legalising it) and the organization itself (which was hostile to the Law for Political Reform for its exclusion of the opposition); however, when Suárez met with PCE secretary general Santiago Carrillo in February 1977, he found Carrillo was willing to cooperate without prior demands, and so in April, the PCE was finally legalised. Juan Carlos' cooperative relationship with the leftist parties was also key in his ability to remain monarch despite the Spanish left's traditional republicanism.

It might sound like this transition was going very peacefully, but sadly insurgency was still ongoing outside of the Cortes; the far-left First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups (Grupos de Resistencia Antifascista Primero de Octubre, GRAPO) kidnapped Traditionalist politician Antonio María Oriol Urquijo in December 1976, and more infamously and brutally, neo-fascist extremists murdered five PCE and labour activists on Atocha Street in Madrid in January 1977, in what has become known as the Atocha Massacre. Ironically, despite the murderers’ intent of sparking a violent left-wing response to legitimize a Francoist coup d’état, this attack instead massively undermined the far-right and instilled sympathy for the PCE to the point that it could be legalised.

With the election upcoming and the left fairly straightforwardly aligned with its two parties we have already discussed (as well as the Socialist Unity (Unidad Socialista, US) alliance that would mostly merge into the PSOE the following year), that leaves the question of what the Spanish right did. The two biggest groupings were led by Manuel Fraga and, of course, Suárez. Fraga formed the more right-wing People’s Alliance (Alianza Popular, AP), which ironically despite his initial reformist and current mainstream conservative leanings was a post-Francoist party, seen by many as a middle-ground between the right and the far-right.

Meanwhile, Suárez took a much broader and more centrist track. The party he created, the Union of the Democratic Centre (Union de Centro Democratico, UCD), was formed in May 1977 and started out as an electoral alliance of no less than fifteen smaller parties, including Christian democrats, social democrats, liberals and regional parties. It fought the 1977 election as such, but since I can’t really find a distinction between who ran where and they merged into one party in August anyway, I’ve just counted them as one party.

And of course, it wouldn’t be Spain without the regional parties- the Basque Nationalist Party (Partido Nacionalista Vasco, PNV in Spanish and Euzko Alderdi Jeltzalea, EAJ in Basque), a big tent Basque nationalist party, took the majority of votes in Biscay and Gipuzkoa, and the latter elected one member from the Basque Country Left (Euskadiko Ezkerra, EE), a Marxist Basque nationalist party. The climate in Catalonia was a bit messier, with the biggest Catalan nationalist party being the liberal Democratic Pact for Catalonia (or Pacte Democràtic per Catalunya, PDC in Catalan), which won the most votes in Gerona and Lleida (or Lérida as it was known at the time), though the Union of the Centre and Christian Democracy of Catalonia, the Catalan wing of the Christian Democratic Team of the Spanish State (Equipo Demócrata Cristiano del Estado Español, EDCEE), and the socialist Left of Catalonia-Electoral Democratic Front (Esquerra de Catalunya–Front Electoral Democràtic, EC-FED in Catalan), both took seats in Barcelona. Finally, the Centre Independent Aragonese Candidacy (Candidatura Aragonesa Independiente de Centro, CAIC) took one seat in Aragon (of Catherine fame).

When the results came in, it was clear the UDC would be the largest party, but Suárez fell 11 seats short of an overall majority in the Congress of Deputies. The real success story of the election, however, was the PSOE, which took 118 seats, almost a hundred more than the PCE despite the latter’s status as the main opponents of Franco’s dictatorship, and established itself (and particularly its leader González) as the main opposition to Suárez. It also won the popular vote in the autonomous communities of Andalusia (starting a trend of the large southern region as the party’s heartland, which it has only failed to win pluralities of the vote in in 2011 and 2016), Asturias, Catalonia and Valencia, and came barely 5 points behind the UDC.

Despite this democratic election being a success for Spain, the 1977 election did not mark the end of the transition to democracy. Rather, the so-called Constituent Cortes that was formed by the newly-elected Parliament would continue that process, and with it would continue a sizeable amount of political unrest.
 
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Sorry for the old quote but.... *ZERO*? I was thinking of making a very similar map and it's upsetting to know there's literally no resources on the net.
Yeah, it's a real problem, not just for alt-history maps and timelines, but OTL research as well (it was one of the things that stopped a paper I was writing several years back). No one I've reached out to on social media seems to have any version of the maps from before 1994, including folks in South Africa. As @Utgard96 said, maps probably exist but they're likely only in physical form in an archive somewhere. The closest we seem to ever get to a FPTP map of South Africa looks like this proposal from a 2003 commission on electoral reform. Even that isn't a FPTP map proper, but you could probably subdivide it into one if you had the right population density maps to guide you and/or a working knowledge of SA human geography (neither of which I possess, sadly).

There was also a proposal for electoral reform along the Irish model (small STV constituencies) from the opposition Democratic Alliance before the 2014 and 2019 elections, but frustratingly they do not appear to have drawn up proposed boundaries as part of the process (which is sensible, I suppose, given that it would be wasted effort unless they won the election).

It's really frustrating because there are a lot of great timelines that could be built with even a rudimentary map of the old constituencies (plus aforementioned OTL research).
 
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The 1977-79 Spanish Cortes, though sometimes called the Constituent Cortes, was not technically one when it convened, as in a de jure sense it was supposed to to rule under the Francoist Fundamental Laws (Leyes Fundamentales). Practically speaking, of course, it absolutely was one. For one thing, it was obvious to just about everyone its role was to continue the transition to democracy and get rid of the last vestiges of Francoism in law.

The process of establishing the constitution and laws that replaced it was mostly in keeping with this principle, and the new Cortes sought to create and mandate a new democratic constitution. Although the UCD retained control of the government, the prior process of only the government being involved in the constitutional changes finally stopped. Instead, a seven-member panel including three UCD members (Gabriel Cisneros, José Pedro Pérez-Llorca and Miguel Herrero de Miñón) and one member each of the PSOE (Gregorio Peces-Barba), PCE (Jordi Solé Tura), AP (Manuel Fraga) and CDC (Miquel Roca i Junyent) was formed. As with most aspects of the transition at this point, this was done to bring about unity between the Spanish people regardless of political differences.

Something else that reflected this which I didn’t really touch on last time is the ‘pact of forgetting’ (Pacto del olvido), something mandated by the 1977 Amnesty Law. The pact was, when implemented, a nonpartisan process by which both political prisoners and Francoist politicians responsible for human rights violations, atrocities and the like were acquitted, while Francoist memorials like the Valley of the Fallen and the celebration of the ‘Day of Victory’ would not be focused on in political celebrations. Unlike the consensus around post-fascist measures and attitudes seen in places like Germany or Japan, in Spain the pact would eventually become a charged political issue, particularly under the PSOE governments of Zapatero and Sánchez; however, given how many politicians at the time had been actively involved with Franco’s regime and wanted to see the democratic transition through (either out of a genuine desire to atone, or just because of political necessity), that was all in the future in the late 1970s.

The other way in which the new constitutional process had to avoid letting the country divide besides on political lines was on regional lines. Its second article ‘recognizes and guarantees the right to self-government of the nationalities and regions of which it is composed’, a pledge which was used to justify creating a very decentralised unitary state rather than a federation. This decentralised structure allowed Spain’s ‘nationalities and regions’ to choose to attain self-government, and was mostly done in response to Andalusia’s demands for self-government when the impression was given that only the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galacia would get them. By 1983, seventeen devolved governments covering all of Spain had been formed, and the situation in Andalusia would prove to be an important part of the UCD government’s demise, but again, this was yet to materialise on a large scale.

A similar process of political consensus was seen in Spanish economics at this time, in the form of the Moncloa Pact, an austerity plan of sorts that called for wage increases to be capped at 22% in exchange for economic interventionism, including pension and benefit increases, new corporate and wealth taxes, education investment to help move towards free education, and slum removal programmes to ease the housing shortage. This was intended to combat and unemployment without compromising the right to strike the Suárez government had introduced as part of the transition.

The UCD and the constitution’s nebulousness and focus on ending Francoism’s trappings to get the country moving forward from the regime above all else was hard for the Spanish public to really unify against and bring down, even if enough of them had all resented it at the same time. Consequently, once the Cortes approved the constitution, it was put to a referendum on the 6th December (which is now a national holiday in Spain, Constitution Day or Día de la Constitución) and passed with 91.8% of the vote.

With all the talk of consensus in this period, it probably isn’t surprising to hear the 1979 election, partly called to introduce a Cortes elected under the newly ratified constitution and partly so Suárez could try to win an overall majority, was quite a muted affair. The turnout fell by almost 11% to 68.0%, and the UCD only picked up 3 seats. Fortunately for them, though, the PSOE didn’t manage to capitalize, and despite having merged with the PSP (the part of the US that had won seats in 1977), won less of the vote and fewer seats than the two parties had separately two years earlier. Part of the reason for this was the rise of a new party in its heartland of Andalusia, the Andalusian Party (Partido Andalucista, PA) a federalist socialist party that fought for recognition of Andalusia as a nation that was conquered by Spain. Ultimately, it pragmatically fought for Andalusia to receive the same ‘fast-track’ process of autonomy as the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galacia. Despite the PSOE’s losses, the PCE did manage to pick up three seats, so it wasn’t all bad news for the national left.

Meanwhile on the right, for this election only the People’s Alliance formed an early UCD-esque coalition known as the Democratic Coalition (Coalición Democrática, CD). Ironically, like the PSOE after cooperating with larger parties they did worse rather than better, and lost nearly half their seats. More concerningly, Blas Piñar, an ardent Francoist and opponent of the 1978 Constitution, won one seat in Madrid as part of the National Union (Unión nacional, UN) coalition. He would thankfully lose his seat in 1982, and remains the only advocate of the return of Francoism ever elected to the modern Cortes.

The regional parties also saw a bit of a shake-up; we’ve already talked about the PA, but it had happened in the Basque Country and Catalonia too. In September 1978, the PDC and UDC in Catalonia had formed a centrist alliance, Convergence and Union (Convergència i Unió, CiU), which was more commonly described as a ‘federation’ of the two parties. Its first election saw it lose 5 seats and fail to win the popular vote of any provinces as the PDC had in 1977, but despite this inauspicious start, it would remain a feature of Catalan politics until 2015. The alliance of Catalan leftist parties, now known as the Republican Left of Catalonia-National Front of Catalonia (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya-Front Nacional de Catalunya, ERC-FNC), held their one seat in Barcelona, as did the Aragonese Party (Partido Aragonés, PAR) in Aragon, while in the Basque Country, the EAJ/PNV lost a seat and the EE held its single seat.

Three new regional parties also sprung up in different provinces- the biggest and most colourful of these was Herri Batasuna (HB; the name is Basque for ‘Popular Unity’), which was another coalition, this one founded to bring together leftist Basque nationalists opposed to the 1978 constitution. Ambiguously tied to the separatist Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) group, when elected HB’s three members abstained from taking their seats in the Cortes, though their participation at all was seen as a positive by the Spanish government. Comparisons to Sinn Fein, albeit with a dollop of anti-capitalism, are fairly apt. On the opposite side of the coin was the Navarrese People’s Union (Unión del Pueblo Navarro, UPN), which is unusual among Spanish regional parties in its active opposition to another regional party and alliance with Spanish unionism. Finally, the Canarian People’s Union (Unión del Pueblo Canario, UPC), a self-determinist and communist party, won one seat in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands and almost pushed the PSOE to second (though both were over 40 points behind the UCD). Somewhat surprisingly, Galician regional parties didn’t win any seats, which I feel is a shame not because I have any stance on Galician political autonomy but because of the Galician Worker’s Party (POG), which is probably tied with the DAB party in Hong Kong for my pick as the most amusing acronym for a political party.

The PCD stayed in power by forming a minority government with support from the CD, but its success as a catch-all party would not last into the next term. Despite its successful role in the establishment of the new Constitution and the democratic transition nearing its end, the main thing keeping the many factions of the PCD together was gone, and without it, the party would slowly begin to fall apart.
 
That was for an STV proposal if I remember right. I've seen that constituency map before, and while it's better than nothing, the population size of those districts are uneven and too big... Oh well.
The twitter thread below has a few proposals for OTL South Africa that might give some inspiration, whether it be furthering the current discussion or for use for any potential alt-hist timelines.

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As to historical maps, the obvious dearth in any real resources pre-1990s is quite irritating: You occasionally stumble on tantalising... clues, I guess, such as one online paper which oh so briefly touches on the gerrymandering of the United Party leader's "Hottentots-Holland" seat, to make it lean National Party (1958 / 1961 elections) - to give an example. I don't know if it would be worth trying to contact the South African national archives, or universities? (in Stellenbosch, Cape Town or Pretoria?)
 
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@CobaltChloride - those are amazing finds. Having South Africa with an electoral system more like New Zealand or Denmark, rather than its OTL one, really shakes things up. If anything, the ANC looks to be even more dominant.
It sorta makes sense, given the relative support bases of the DA and ANC; while the DA does draw a healthy-ish percentage of the Black vote (I wanna say it was something like ~8-10% in 2019?), its real constituency is in the White and Coloured communities (and some Indian communities), which are concentrated in Cape Town, the Western Cape province, and the cities in Gauteng (Pretoria and Jo'burg). The hypothetical DA seats in eThekwini (Durban) are almost certainly predominantly mixed-race or Indian areas.
 
The twitter thread below has a few proposals for OTL South Africa that might give some inspiration, whether it be furthering the current discussion or for use for any potential alt-hist timelines.

EcJ1JCfWkAI2AQa
EcJ4vzAXgAIVOaY


As to historical maps, the obvious dearth in any real resources pre-1990s is quite irritating: You occasionally stumble on tantalizing... clues, I guess, such as one online paper which oh so briefly touches on the gerrymandering of the United Party leader's "Hottentots-Holland" seat, to make it lean National Party (1958 / 1961 elections) - to give an example. I don't know if it would be worth trying to contact the South African national archives, or universities? (in Stellenbosch, Cape Town or Pretoria?)
Adrian Frith makes great maps, and I am thankful for the various maps he's uploaded on wikipedia on South Africa. And it's quite obvious that there were records of the seat boundaries that were publicly available back then, but they're all missing from the internet. I remember seeing election coverage for the 1984 election saved on youtube and they showed the preliminary results as the night went on, including information on seat flips... and yet not a single constituency map. Well I think I found the equivalent of a screenshot in an old book dating from the 1970s once, but it's centered on the Cape Winelands region and it's almost impossible to read. It's all a veritable mystery.
 
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The steady demise of Suárez and the PCD over the course of the 1979-82 Cortes was partially thanks to factors which were affecting the rest of the world in the period, like rising inflation and unemployment exacerbated by the oil crisis, but the character of the PCD and the political environment of Spain at the time was particularly important in why the party collapsed so absolutely.

For starters, you had the party’s weak performances in local politics; just a month after the 1979 election, the PCD lost most of the main urban centres to alliances between the PSOE and PCE in the municipal elections, and the start of autonomous assemblies proved even more damaging. The Basque Country and Catalonia had regional elections which the PNV and CiU won respectively at the expense of the PCD, but even more humiliating was the process in Andalusia. Its residents wanted the right to full autonomy approved through article 151 of the Constitution just like the former two nations, and in a situation not unlike the Scottish devolution referendum in the UK the year before, the government subjected this to a very harsh requirement. The Andalusian referendum held on the 28th February 1980 (now known as Andalusia Day) required not just a Yes majority, and not just a majority of Yes votes in all eight provinces, but a majority of registered voters in every province, for assent.

While the UCD supported abstaining in the referendum, the PSOE called for voters to vote in favour, and the statute was approved by 94.2% of Andalusians, but since Almería did not see a majority of registered voters support the process, the initiative was not ratified. Not surprisingly, this caused uproar among Andalusians and created a deadlock in the Cortes that lasted until November. In the midst of this deadlock, PSOE leader Felipe González called a motion of no confidence in the UCD government, and though this motion failed, the debate over the measure and the positive perceptions of González’s performance in it helped emphasize the PSOE as a viable alternative government in the making, while the fact that no member outside the UCD voted for the government further humiliated Suárez.

These crises of confidence in the Suárez government finally convinced Suárez to announce he would resign as Prime Minister on the 29th January 1981, and two days later the so-called Alemendros Collective (Colectivo Alemandros) published a call for a coup to take place in the far-right newspaper El Alcázar. On the 23rd February, the day a second round on the vote for Suárez’s proposed replacement Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo to become the new Prime Minister was held, the so-called ‘23-F’ coup d’état attempt (also known as the Tejerazo, after its main instigator, Liutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero) took place. Tejero led 200 armed rebel members of the Civil Guard into the Cortes at 18:23, and after numerous shots to the air (which can still be seen in the Plenary Hall ceiling), Suárez, González, the latter’s deputy Alfonso Guerra, PCE leader Santiago Carrillo, and PCD president and Defence Minister Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún were taken prisoner in the hopes of creating a power vacuum the insurgents could take control through. Around the same time, Jaime Milans del Bosche sent 2,000 men and 50 tanks into Valencia city centre.

The collapse of the coup was largely down to two people; the Colonel of the 11th Wing of Manises Air Base, who threatened to launch two fighter jets against Milans del Bosch’s tanks and forced him to withdraw, and King Juan Carlos, who ordered a provisional government to be formed in alliance with the Assembly of Military Chiefs of Staff to negotiate for a peaceful settlement. Juan Carlos made a speech at 1:14am on the 24th both within Spain and internationally in which he declared his unambiguous support for the democratic process of Spanish government and opposition to those attempting to overthrow it.

The failure of the 23-F coup is sometimes considered the final end of the transition to democracy, as it saw the collapse of the final substantive attempt to return the country to Francoist totalitarianism. In a way, it can also be seen as a major blow to Spanish republicanism, as the King had been integral in the failure of the coup and was enormously legitimized, perhaps even moreso than he had been for instigating the transition from Francoism in the first place.

Practically the one thing modern Spanish democracy hadn’t seen yet was a peaceful handover of power, and the Calvo-Sotelo government was only too happy to help make sure that happened. Under his tenure, a scandal saw 20,000 people poisoned and over 600 killed by rapeseed oil that was intended for industrial and not food use, the Catholic Church and the UCD’s right forced the resignation of Justice Minister Francisco Fernández Ordóñez for legalizing divorce (Fernández Ordóñez would split from the party and joined the PSOE in time for the 1982 election), and even Suárez was critical of how Calvo-Sotelo’s government handled Spain joining NATO in a rushed manner without considering the consequences.

Two of the regional elections held around this time signalled the death knell for the UCD- firstly, the October 1981 Galician election was won by the AP despite the UCD’s traditional dominance there, and then in May 1982, it was reduced to third in the first Andalusian election. This latter result was probably not surprising considering the so-called ‘Andalusian mistake’, but it immediately caused the UCD to fall behind the AP as well as the PSOE in opinion polls. In July, Calvo-Sotelo announced he would not run for re-election as Prime Minister (though he would stay in place until the election), and his successor Landelino Lavilla was chosen as his successor with 67% of the vote, which sounds like an impressive display of unity from the UCD until you realize he was the only candidate. Soon after, the UCD has fallen to just 150 of 350 seats in the Cortes, and Calvo-Sotelo, knowing the party couldn’t even govern until the legislature’s term expired in 1983, called a snap election for the 28th October.

Just to underline how hopeless the UCD’s cause was at this point, Suárez, after a failed bid to regain the leadership, split from the party and founded his own centrist party, the Democratic and Social Centre (Centro Democrático y Social, CDS), while 13 deputies led by Óscar Alzaga split from the UCD to form the People’s Democratic Party (Partido Demócrata Popular, PDP), which ran in coalition with the AP.

Speaking of the AP-PDP ticket, that was one side of where the UCD was bleeding its vote to. Manuel Fraga had finally managed to moderate its agenda to a sort of soft neoliberal party, with a Christian democratic streak to the alliance brought by its coalition partner. The AP-PDP ran emphasising Fraga’s leadership, though not his stances on social issues, and had the goal of becoming the main centre-right force (not a high bar with the UCD in freefall, mind).

The other side of where the UCD’s vote was bleeding was, of course, to the PSOE. Ironically, it had initially looked like it would drift leftwards back in 1979- González resigned at the 27th party congress because the party would not drop its advocacy of Marxism, but at the 28th congress later that year, the party agreed to do so and he resumed leadership from the caretaker committee which had held it. This move was supported by other European social democratic parties, who pumped funds into it as a result, though ironically it still didn’t have as well-funded a campaign as the UCD.

Despite this shift, the PSOE still ran on a fairly leftist policy agenda, pledging to nationalize the banks in a critical economic situation, implement a 40-hour maximum week, raise taxes on the rich and expand unemployment insurance, and push for Spain to leave NATO (though eventually it went back on this in the referendum held 4 years later). Consequently, it’s probably not quite fair to accuse González of being a proto-Blair, Prodi or Schroeder, and more accurate to compare his tactics to those François Mitterrand used to win the Presidency of France the year before him. Also like Mitterrand, González would enjoy a long stay in power, but would struggle to make his party’s ambitious plans quite live up to the hopes of his supporters.

In any case, the 1982 election was a triumph for the PSOE that has never been surpassed electorally. It took 48.1% of the vote and 202 seats, the first time a party had won a majority on its own in the modern Cortes. The AP-PDP alliance easily came second, though, taking 107 seats and winning a plurality of the vote in seven provinces. Surprisingly enough, third place went to the CiU Catalan electoral alliance, which took a small plurality over the PSOE in Girona and won 12 seats, one more than the UCD, which plummeted to 11 seats and would be dissolved less than 4 months later. (The only governing party ever to lose so badly in a Western country has been the PCs in Canada, and like in that case, a more right-wing party would functionally replace it only to promptly spend over a decade in opposition.)

The colossal victory of the PSOE also rather overshadowed the minor parties, with the PNV and Herri Batasuna gaining and losing a seat in the Basque Country, the ERC and EE holding steady, and every other regional party no longer being represented in the Cortes. Thanks to tactical voting, the PCE also collapsed, taking just 4 seats, while Suárez’s CDS took 2 seats and more than a third as many votes as the UCD itself.

González’s enormous majority, so great it received the nickname of el rodillo (‘the roller’) for the dominance it gave the PSOE, marked the first time Spain would have a government where no members had served under Franco since 1939 and the first electoral victory for the Spanish socialists since 1936. This and González’s personal popularity meant the public had high hopes for it, and though they would be disappointed in many ways in the next fourteen years, González would go on to become the longest-serving Prime Minister of Spain in a free and democratic period.
 
I am going to do my traditional Welsh Assembly Results map for the 2021 election.

What colours would you recommend I use for the Abolish The Welsh Assembly Party [AKA UKIP Splinter Group #776-C], and [Whateverthehell Nigel Farage's Party Is Called Now]?


EDIT: In my current draft, I have repurposed the SDLP colour scheme for Abolish
 
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Does anyone have data on the results for the 1986 French election? I know the results were done by department, but I haven't been able to find any resources that state how the seats were distributed or who won where, and this site (which I usually use for French election results) doesn't seem to show it like it does the FPTP elections.
 
I am just waiting for the full results of the Welsh Senedd Election to be posted onto Wikipedia. The map should be finished by this evening.

At least there are just three parties and Jane Dodds, instead of <um, what day of the week is this?>.

EDIT: and here it is:

Welsh Election 2021.png
 
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