Madrid City Council election, 1979

3 April 1979

1983 →

All 59 seats in the City Council of Madrid
30 seats needed for a majority

Registered

2,378,941

Turnout

1,569,610 (66.0%)

	First party	Second party	Third party

Leader	José Luis Álvarez	Enrique Tierno Galván	Ramón Tamames
Party	UCD	PSOE	PCE
Leader since	1979	1979	1979
Leader's seat	Madrid	Madrid	Madrid
Seats won	25	25	9
Popular vote	632,329	619,772	230,651
Percentage	40.3%	39.5%	14.7%

Mayor before election

Luis María Huete y Morillo
UCD

Elected Mayor

Enrique Tierno Galván
PSOE

Luis María Huete y Morillo
UCD

Enrique Tierno Galván
PSOE

The 1979 Madrid City Council election was held on Tuesday, 3 April 1979, to elect the city council of the municipality of Madrid. All 59 seats in the City Council were up for election.

The Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD) emerged as the most voted party, but in a seat tie with the second force, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), at 25 seats. As neither had an absolute majority of seats, it was up to the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) 9 seats to decide which party was to govern in Madrid.

Finally, an agreement between the PSOE and PCE resulted in Enrique Tierno Galván being named as the first democratically elected Mayor of Madrid.

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 1979 election was 3,355,720, the Madrid City Council size was set to 59 seats.

All City Council members were elected in a single multi-member district, consisting of the Madrid municipality, using the D'Hondt method and a closed-list proportional representation system. Voting was on the basis of universal suffrage in a secret ballot. Only lists polling above 5% of valid votes in all of the municipality (which include blank ballots—for none of the above) were entitled to enter the seat distribution.

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