The 2019 Local Elections in Valencia’s Metropolitan Area

Voting behaviour in Valencia’s Metropolitan Area can be split into four periods: (1) During the early years of democracy (1979-1991) following the Franco dictatorship, the area was a stronghold of the Left; (2) In 1991, the City of Valencia switched and was governed by the Right; (3) In 2011, the Right extended its control to the whole of the Metropolitan Area; (4) In the May 2015 elections, the Left won not only in the ‘red’ metropolitan belt but also in the City of Valencia. This study looks at what happened in the last set of local elections in 2019. To this end, we begin with a brief review of the election results, voting trends, and the institutional performance of each party since the first post-dictatorship local elections in 1979. We then go on to analyse the electoral behaviour of each of the parties, breaking this down by geographical variables: town/village size, comarcas (‘counties’), and the so-called ‘red belt’ before drawing our conclusions.