2000 Spanish general election

A general election was held in Spain on Sunday, 12 March 2000, to elect the members of the 7th Cortes Generales under the Spanish Constitution of 1978. All 350 seats in the Congress of Deputies were up for election, as well as 208 of 259 seats in the Senate. It was held concurrently with a regional election in Andalusia. At four years since the previous one, the 2000 election ended the longest legislative period up to that point since the Spanish transition to democracy.

The incumbent People's Party (PP) of Prime Minister José María Aznar had been able to access power for the first time since the Spanish transition to democracy through the Majestic Pact in 1996 with peripheral nationalist parties, namely: Convergence and Union (CiU), the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and Canarian Coalition (CC). In that period, Aznar's cabinet had presided over an economic boom—together with a privatization of state-owned companies—a reduction of the unemployment rate and the introduction of the euro, as well as increasing public outcry at the terrorist activity of the ETA group (reaching its peak with the killing of Miguel Ángel Blanco in 1997) and an early social response to growing immigration to Spain, with the El Ejido riots in February 2000. The opposition was divided, with the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) looking for stable leadership after the farewell of Felipe González and a period of duumvirate between his successor, Joaquín Almunia, and prime ministerial nominee Josep Borrell (elected through primaries), until Borrell's sudden resignation in May 1999.

The election saw the PP securing an unexpected absolute majority in the Congress of Deputies, obtaining 183 out of 350 seats and increasing its margin of victory with the PSOE. A pre-election agreement between the PSOE and United Left (IU) was unsuccessful, with such alliance being said to prompt tactical voting for Aznar, who also benefited from a moderate stance during his tenure. Almunia announced his resignation immediately after results were known, triggering a leadership election. Regional and peripheral nationalist parties improved their results, except for CiU—which had been in electoral decline for a decade following its support to Spanish ruling parties—and the abertzale left-supported Euskal Herritarrok (EH), which urged its voters in the Basque Country and Navarre to boycott the election. The PNV benefitted from EH's absence and gained two seats, whereas both CC and the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG) had strong showings in their respective regions. Initiative for Catalonia (IC), which had split from IU in 1997, clung on to parliamentary representation but suffered from the electoral competition with United and Alternative Left (EUiA), IU's newly-founded regional branch in Catalonia which failed to secure any seat. This would be the first and only general election in which both parties would contest each other.

This marked the first time that the PP secured a nationwide absolute majority, its best result in both popular vote share and seats up until then (only exceeded in 2011), as well as the first time that PP results exceeded the combined totals for PSOE and IU. In contrast, the PSOE got its worst election result in 21 years. This was the second time a party received more than 10 million votes, the previous one being in 1982. Voter turnout was one of the lowest for Spanish election standards up to that time, with only 68.7% of the electorate casting a vote.