2011 Spanish general election

A general election was held in Spain on Sunday, 20 November 2011, to elect the members of the 10th 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 266 seats in the Senate.

The second term of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was quickly overshadowed by the impact of the Great Recession in Spain, aggravated by the bursting of the Spanish property bubble that led to a real state crisis. Unemployment reached record highs as public deficit and the risk premium soared, with the popularity of Zapatero's government and his Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) plummeting after being forced to U-turn in economic policy and adopt tough spending cuts and austerity measures, as well as a constitutional reform in 2011 capping future deficits. Concurrently, the weakening of the Catalan Statute of Autonomy by the Constitutional Court in 2010 sparked protests and helped fuel pro-independence sentiment in the region. Despite the economic outlook, the government still attempted to push through some measures in its social agenda, such as a liberalization of abortion laws.

Consistent opinion polling leads for the opposition People's Party (PP) under Mariano Rajoy—who had survived a plot to overthrow him during a 2008 party congress—a general strike, an air traffic controllers' strike forcing the government's use of emergency powers for the first time in democracy, the onset of the anti-austerity 15-M Movement, and the PSOE's collapse in the 2011 local and regional elections, forced Zapatero to renounce running for a third term in office (with the first deputy prime minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, being selected as PSOE candidate without opposition) and for a snap election to be called for November 2011, five months ahead of schedule. During this period, separatist group ETA announced a permanent ceasefire and cessation of armed operations, turning the election into the first since the Spanish transition to democracy without ETA activity.

Under falling voter turnout, the election resulted in the PSOE being swept out from power in the worst defeat for a sitting government in Spain up until that time since 1982, losing 4.3 million votes and scoring its worst result in a general election ever since the first democratic election in 1977. In contrast, Rajoy's PP won a record absolute majority in a landslide, being his party's best historic result as well as the second largest and, to date, last single-party majority in Spanish democracy. Also for the first time in a general election, the PSOE failed to come out on top in both Andalusia and Catalonia, with the nationalist Convergence and Union (CiU) emerging victorious in the later, whereas the abertzale left Amaiur achieved a major breakthrough in both the Basque Country and Navarre. United Left (IU) saw a turnaround of its electoral fortunes with its first remarkable increase in fifteen years, whereas centrist Union, Progress and Democracy (UPyD) exceeded all expectations with over one million votes, five seats and just short of the 5% threshold required for being recognized a parliamentary group in Congress.