The 1982 Spanish general election was held on Thursday, 28 October 1982, to elect the 2nd of the Kingdom of Spain. All 350 seats in the Congress of Deputies were up for election, as well as 208 of 254 seats in the Senate.
The election was called several months ahead of schedule on 27 August 1982, by the then Prime Minister Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, amid poor opinion poll ratings and severe infighting within his party, the Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD), that had seen the splits of former prime minister Adolfo Suárez's Democratic and Social Centre (CDS), Óscar Alzaga's People's Democratic Party (PDP) and the Democratic Action Party (PAD) of former minister Francisco Fernández Ordóñez. The closing legislature had been characterized by political instability and the effects of an economic downturn resulting from the 1979 oil crisis: Suárez himself had resigned the premiership in January 1981 as a result of the ongoing UCD crisis, a military coup d'etat attempt had been thwarted during Calvo-Sotelo's investiture on 23 February 1981, and the UCD had become increasingly isolated during the administrative set up of the so-called "state of the autonomies", both parliamentarily—a result of its minority status and continuous defections—and politically, having been routed in every regional election held since 1979: the Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia and Andalusia. Calvo-Sotelo himself had chosen not to run for re-election.
The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) led by Felipe González won the largest landslide victory in a Spanish democratic election, with 48.1% of the vote and a strong majority of 202 out of 350 seats in the Congress, by running a mainstream modern social democratic campaign and appealing to political change. The UCD, on the other hand, was decimated, losing 93% of its 1979 seats and roughly 80% of its 1979 vote—still the worst defeat that a sitting government has suffered since the restoration of democracy, and one of the worst defeats ever suffered by a governing party in the Western world. The right-wing People's Alliance (AP), led into the election by former Francoist minister Manuel Fraga, benefitted greatly from the UCD's losses, becoming the main opposition party to the Socialists with slightly over 100 seats and 26.4% of the vote. Adolfo Suárez's CDS had a modest entry into the Congress with 2 seats and 2.9% of the vote, while the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) vote plummeted, suffering from tactical voting to the PSOE. Turnout remains, at 79.97%, the highest ever recorded in a general election held in Spain to date. The 1982 election was the last general election to be held on a day other than Sunday.
González took office on 2 December, heading the first government in 43 years in which none of its members had served under Francoism.
Overview
Electoral system
The Spanish were envisaged as an imperfect bicameral system. The Congress of Deputies had greater legislative power than the Senate, having the ability to vote confidence in or withdraw it from a prime minister and to override Senate vetoes by an absolute majority of votes. Nonetheless, the Senate possessed a few exclusive (yet limited in number) functions—such as its role in constitutional amendment—which were not subject to the Congress' override. Voting for the Cortes Generales was on the basis of universal suffrage, which comprised all nationals over 18 years of age and in full enjoyment of their political rights.
For the Congress of Deputies, 348 seats were elected using the D'Hondt method and a closed list proportional representation, with an electoral threshold of three percent of valid votes—which included blank ballots—being applied in each constituency. Seats were allocated to constituencies, corresponding to the provinces of Spain, with each being allocated an initial minimum of two seats and the remaining 248 being distributed in proportion to their populations, at a rate of approximately one seat per each 144,500 inhabitants or fraction greater than 70,000. Ceuta and Melilla were allocated the two remaining seats, which were elected using plurality voting. The use of the D'Hondt method might result in a higher effective threshold, depending on the district magnitude.
As a result of the aforementioned allocation, each Congress multi-member constituency was entitled the following seats: