When the residents of the Catalan municipality of l'Hospitalet de Llobregat had the opportunity to elect their first democratic mayor, the Socialists swept the polls. Forty years after that April 3, 1979, the PSOE continues to win with an absolute majority.
As in l'Hospitalet, there are another 156 Spanish municipalities that have always been faithful to the same democratic political formation. This figure rises to 517 if we include the localities governed by the PP since the municipal ones of 1983 —Alianza Popular, father of the PP, did not run in the first elections. All of them represent 6% of the total number of municipalities in the State.
The town of l'hospitalet de Llobregat perfectly represents the socialist profile: with more than 265,000 inhabitants it is the second city in the community — and the sixteenth most populous in the country — and stands in the metropolitan crown of Barcelona.
If l'Hospitalet represents the socialist stronghold, the Leonese town of Bustillo del Páramo embodies that of the popular. This town of 1,094 inhabitants and 40% of them over 65 years of age has always had a PP mayor.
In addition to representing the archetype of a bastion due to its sociodemographic characteristics, the politics of this Leonese municipality has its own name: Faustino Sutil. This popular mayor won ten consecutive legislatures with an absolute majority and has led the consistory since 1983.
The strongholds of the PP are located above all in Castilla y León and are distributed in a very similar way throughout the nine provinces, with the exception of Segovia: 42 municipalities in Palencia, 31 in Ávila and Salamanca, 27 in Burgos, 24 in Valladolid, 21 in Soria, 20 in Zamora, 15 in León and 6 in Segovia.
All these localities, a little less than 10% of the total number of Castilian-Leonese municipalities, have in common their low population density and the age of their residents.
Although this is the general rule with historically popular municipalities, Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid), Santa Eulària Des Riu (Balearic Islands) or Villaviciosa de Odón (Madrid) are exceptions. These localities, with 87,700, 40,500 and 28,100 inhabitants, respectively, have always been administered by the PP.
Sant Boi de Llobregat (Barcelona), Fuenlabrada (Madrid), Quart de Poblet and Picanya (Valencia) and Alcalá de Guadaíra (Seville), in addition to being municipalities in the four most populous metropolitan areas in Spain, have another aspect in common: they all they have always been led by the PSOE.
The vast majority of socialist enclaves, however, are concentrated in Andalusia: one in Cádiz, two in Málaga, three in Almería, five in Córdoba and Huelva, seven in Granada and Seville, and nine in Jaén.
In Catalonia, the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC) and Convergència, and now its political heir Junts, are the only formations that have led consistories without interruption since 1979, eight and 21, respectively. If the influence of the PSOE in Andalusia follows a unified pattern, that of the PSC in Barcelona is an exception.
With more than 3.2 million inhabitants, the Área Metropolitana de Barcelona (AMB) concentrates 42.8% of the entire Catalan population in 36 different municipalities. Five of these 36 localities have always been governed by socialist mayors: l'Hospitalet, Esplugues de Llobregat, Sant Adrià, Sant Boi and Gavà. Together they represent 15% of the population of the AMB.
The socialist localities outside this crown are Canovelles and Santa Margarida and les Monjos, in Barcelona; and Torroella de Fluvià, in Girona, where Pere Moradell has been mayor uninterruptedly since 1979 and this May 28 he could take the first step to start his eleventh term.
