April 2019 Spanish general election

A general election was held in Spain on Sunday, 28 April 2019, to elect the members of the 13th 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. It was held concurrently with a regional election in the Valencian Community.

Following the 2016 election, the People's Party (PP) formed a minority government with confidence and supply support from Citizens (Cs) and Canarian Coalition, enabled by the opposition Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) abstaining from Mariano Rajoy's investiture after a party crisis saw the ousting of Pedro Sánchez as leader. Rajoy's second term in office was undermined by a constitutional crisis over the Catalan independence issue and the outcome of a regional election held thereafter, coupled with corruption scandals, the 2018 Spanish women's strike and pensioners' protests demanding pension hikes. In May 2018, the National Court found that the PP had profited from the kickbacks-for-contracts scheme in the Gürtel case and confirmed the existence of an illegal accounting and funding structure. Sánchez, who had been re-elected as PSOE leader in a party primary in 2017, brought down Rajoy's government through a motion of no confidence on 1 June 2018. Rajoy subsequently resigned as PP leader, being succeeded by Pablo Casado after a face-off with Rajoy's deputy, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, in a leadership contest in July.

Presiding over a minority government of 84 deputies, Pedro Sánchez struggled to maintain a working majority in the Congress with the support of the parties that had backed the no-confidence motion. The 2018 Andalusian regional election, which saw a strong performance of the far-right Vox party, resulted in the PSOE losing the regional government for the first time in history to a PP–Cs–Vox alliance. After the 2019 General State Budget was voted down in the Congress as a result of Republican Left of Catalonia and Catalan European Democratic Party siding against the government, Sánchez called a snap election to be held on 28 April, one month ahead of the "Super Sunday" of local, regional, and European Parliament elections scheduled for 26 May.

On a voter turnout of 71.8%, Sánchez's PSOE won a victory—the first for the party in a nationwide election in eleven years—with an improvement of 38 seats over its previous mark which mostly came at the expense of left-wing Unidas Podemos. The PSOE also became the largest party in the Senate for the first time since 1995, winning its first absolute majority of seats in that chamber since the 1989 election. The PP under Casado was reduced to 66 seats and 16.7% of the vote in what was dubbed the worst electoral setback for a major Spanish party since the collapse of the Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD) in 1982, and which was blamed to the party's shift to the right during the campaign. Cs saw an increase of support which brought them within striking distance of the PP, overcoming the latter in several major regions. The far-right Vox party entered Congress for the first time, but it failed to fulfill opinion polling expectations. The three-way split in the overall right-of-centre vote not only ended any chance of an Andalusian-inspired right-wing alliance, but it also ensured that Sánchez's PSOE would be the only party that could realistically form a government.