INDEPENDENT and minority parties on the Spanish political scene complain they need six or seven times as many votes to gain a seat as the much larger socialists (PSOE) and People's Party (PP).
Left-wing Podemos' leader Pablo Iglesias says the electoral system in Spain needs to be reformed 'now' to ensure it 'better reflects the realities of society', in contrast to one of the two main parties Iglesias refers to as the 'Caste' – the PP wants to change the rules so that the party with the most votes wins automatically, thus preventing those with fewer forming coalitions to enter into government.
Out of 350 seats, the winning party on Sunday, December 20 needed 176 to govern in a majority, but the one with the highest number of seats, the PP, earned just 123.
With just over 7.2 million votes, this means each seat was worth 58,595 ballots with the PP's name on them.
The PP's nearest rival, the left-wing PSOE, won 90 seats, each of which was worth 61,393 votes.
Podemos' votes, 3,177,210 in total, won them 42 seats – excluding those of other branches of the main party – or 75,648 votes per seat, whilst centre-right Ciudadanos' 3,496,301 votes won them 40 seats, or one seat per 87,408 votes.
United Left, or Izquierda Unida (IU) gained 921,955 votes and two seats, or 460,978 per seat.
Its leader, Alberto Garzón, says it is 'totally unfair' how 'some parties only need 60,000 votes per seat and others need well over 400,000'.
If IU needs nearly 461,000 votes per seat and the PP 58,595, this means if the latter earned only half the number of votes as United Left, it would have four seats to IU's one.
This is because of a system known as the D'hondt Law, which political studies experts say is far from ideal, but 'better than that of countries like the UK' where victory goes to the highest votes.
How does it work?
Each of Spain's 50 provinces, known in electoral language as 'circumscriptions' or constituencies, are automatically given two MPs out of the 350 in central government, whilst the Spanish-owned enclaves on the northern Moroccan coast – Ceuta and Melilla – get one each.
The remainder are shared out according to population numbers in different provinces, meaning Madrid and Barcelona have 36 and 31 respectively, whilst Soria, in centre-northern Castilla y León, only has the minimum of two.
Named after the 19th-century Belgian judge Victor D'Hondt, the law covering proportional distribution of votes and seats also applies in Ireland, France, Finland, Argentina, Japan, Israel, and naturally, Belgium.
For each constituency, calculation starts by excluding candidates who have not obtained at least 3% of the valid vote total, then the rest are placed in descending order starting with the one who gained the most.
They are then numbered 1, 2, 3, and so forth until the list for each province's MP quota is filled.
Those at the top need fewer votes to get a seat.
Example of distribution
If a province, or constituency has five MPs from a total of three parties and they have all earned at least 3% of the votes, they will be numbered one to five with number one being the MP with the most votes and five, the fewest.
The number of votes per party is then divided by 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5......
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com