2003 Madrid City Council election

The 2003 Madrid City Council election, also the 2003 Madrid municipal election, was held on Sunday, 25 May 2003, to elect the 7th City Council of the municipality of Madrid. All 55 seats in the City Council were up for election. The election was held simultaneously with regional elections in thirteen autonomous communities and local elections all throughout Spain.

The People's Party (PP) under President of the Community of Madrid Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, who was succeeding the retiring José María Álvarez del Manzano, managed to revert the near-tie situation predicted by opinion polls between his party and the PSOE-IU bloc. Gallardón went on to win a comfortable absolute majority both in votes and seats, reverting the 1999 result in which it had seemed that party's support had begun to decline. The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) under Trinidad Jiménez obtained its best result since it was ousted from power in 1989, despite it not being enough to recover the mayoralty. United Left (IU) continued on its long-term decline and lost another seat, scoring its worst result since 1987.

A remarkable event for this election was that both main parties' contenders (Ruiz-Gallardón and Jiménez) were cousins, despite belonging to opposing parties.

Electoral system
The City Council of Madrid (Ayuntamiento de Madrid) was the top-tier administrative and governing body of the municipality of Madrid, composed of the mayor, the government council and the elected plenary assembly. Elections to the local councils in Spain were fixed for the fourth Sunday of May every four years. Voting for the local assembly was on the basis of universal suffrage, which comprised all nationals over 18 years of age, registered in the municipality of Madrid and in full enjoyment of their political rights, as well as resident non-national European citizens and those whose country of origin allowed Spanish nationals to vote in their own elections by virtue of a treaty.

Local councillors were elected using the D'Hondt method and a closed list proportional representation, with an electoral threshold of five percent of valid votes—which included blank ballots—being applied in each local council. Councillors were allocated to municipal councils based on the following scale:

The mayor was indirectly elected by the plenary assembly. A legal clause required that mayoral candidates earned the vote of an absolute majority of councillors, or else the candidate of the most-voted party in the assembly was to be automatically appointed to the post. In the event of a tie, the appointee would be determined by lot.

The electoral law allowed for parties and federations registered in the interior ministry, coalitions and groupings of electors to present lists of candidates. Parties and federations intending to form a coalition ahead of an election were required to inform the relevant Electoral Commission within ten days of the election call, whereas groupings of electors needed to secure the signature of a determined amount of the electors registered in the municipality for which they were seeking election, disallowing electors from signing for more than one list of candidates. For the case of Madrid, as its population was over 1,000,001, at least 8,000 signatures were required.

Opinion polls
The table below lists voting intention estimates in reverse chronological order, showing the most recent first and using the dates when the survey fieldwork was done, as opposed to the date of publication. Where the fieldwork dates are unknown, the date of publication is given instead. The highest percentage figure in each polling survey is displayed with its background shaded in the leading party's colour. If a tie ensues, this is applied to the figures with the highest percentages. The "Lead" column on the right shows the percentage-point difference between the parties with the highest percentages in a poll. When available, seat projections determined by the polling organisations are displayed below (or in place of) the percentages in a smaller font; 28 seats were required for an absolute majority in the City Council of Madrid (27 until 1 January 2003).


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