Massive participation in the Spanish polls: 75% of voters voted

The general elections held on Sunday in Spain recorded one of the most larger holdings since the return to democracy, with 75.31%, a increase of more than 9% compared to previous ones.

Two hours after the closing of the polls, the Interior Ministry reported that participation had exceeded nine percentage points in the 2016 elections, with over 21 million voters, equivalent to 75.31% of the population eligible to vote, compared with 51.21% in June three years ago.

The most significant increase was recorded in Catalonia, whose failed attempt at separation at the end of 2018 provoked the most important crisis of Spanish democracy. The the 64.2% of voters they went to the polls, against 46.3% in 2016, which is almost 18 points more.

In Andalusia, the first autonomous community where the right-wing party Vox obtained parliamentary representation last December and supports a right-wing coalition, 57.2% of voters voted against 50.2% previously.

The fragmentation of the political landscape results from the austerity measures that followed the economic recession, the disenchantment of traditional bipartisanship and the recent rise of far-right populism.

Sanchez called the elections after seeing his budget rejected by the Congress of Deputies in front of the conservative center-right opposition and Catalan separatists who demand the independence of the Northeast.

The contestation concerns the 208 seats of the Senate and the upper house and the 350 parliamentarians of the Congress of Deputies, who will then elect a president.

In addition, for the first time since the democratic transition of the 1970s, More than 100,000 people having a psychic disability, they were able to vote in a general election.