Partido Popular has won the Spanish General Election and will have an overall majority in Congress.

35.7 million Spaniards had the chance on Sunday to decide who is going to govern them for the next four years. It’s the largest ever number, 700,000 more than in 2008.

The voting system in Spain, Ley D’hondt, drawn up at the end of the 19th century by the Begium lawyer, Victor D’Hondt. It favours the largest parties and goes against the smaller parties such as IU and UpyD, and is also the system used in Argentina, France, Belgium, Finland, Ireland, Israel and Japan. 350 deputies represent 52 constituencies and they are assigned according to the LOREG, the Organic Law for the General Election Regime.

Ceuta and Melilla have one deputy each and the rest of the provinces have two deputies as a minimum, and the rest are distributed according to the population ‘empadronada’ in each municipality, This gives Madrid 36 deputies, Barcelona 31 while Soria provinces has just the two minimum.

In each constituency any candidate who has not obtained 3% of the vote is excluded. The rest are put in order of largest vote to smallest vote, and then the number of votes obtained by each candidate is divided by half until a number equal to the number of deputies in the constituency us reached. The seats are assigned by order from the largest to the smallest.

The General Election has cost 124 million, 5.8% down on 2008. 600 million fewer candidate papers have been printed than in previous years and a smaller paper for the Senate has allowed for three million to be saved.