Spanish elections and politics

[palandio]

No de-iure threshold at all. The de-facto threshold comes from the province-based d'Hondt method seat allocation and varies between ca. 2.5% (Madrid) and ca. 25-30% (Soria). Most provinces have between 3 and 8 seats, so the de-facto threshold is ca. 10-20%. Regional parties like CDC, ERC, PNV, Bildu, BNG will get proportional representation, because they are strong in a few provinces. Relatively small parties with more equally distributed support like IU may get seats only in the big provinces of Madrid and Barcelona, even if they get over 5% nationally.

[palandio]

In many European cities there is a huge political difference between the historical center and the surrounding inner-city high-density residential quarters (usually from 1850-1914). Not differentiating between them often leads to confusion.

In many central European cities the historical center is relatively conservative, while most of the surrounding areas are left-wing strongholds.

In many southern European cities the historical center shows very strong results for the radical left, while the surrounding areas are extremely bourgeois.

[palandio]

Thank you, Velasco and tack50! Very interesting informations.

And again I'm trying to generalize: Spanish inner-cities in a wider sense (including the 19th century expansions) are usually quite conservative, at least seen as a whole. But there can be areas that have a strong alternative left (Podemos or similar, not PSOE) and these areas are often the historical city centers or parts thereof, or former inner-city poor-people quarters.