Cortes Generales

Type
 President
 Seats
 Term
 Last Election

The **Cortes Generales** (English: **General Courts**) is the unicameral parliament of Spain, which is mandated by the Spanish constitution and has existed in various forms since 1830; the republican Cortes was formed in 1873 and has existed near continuously ever since, with the exception of the period 1960 to 1980.

The members of the Cortes Generales serve four-year terms in office and are considered the direct representatives of the Spanish people; consequently, they are invested with the sole power to enact legislation on behalf of the population and have the final political say on amendments to the constitution. Seats are allocated by constituencies that correspond with the fifty provinces of Spain, plus Ceuta and Melilla, and the total number of seats has been constitutionally capped at 300 since 1870. During the Federal Republic of Spain, each state of the federation had five guaranteed regional representatives who acted as legislative superdelegates with disproportionate voting power to normal representatives, but these were abolished in 1940.

As the only continuously active check on the executive branch's power, the Cortes Generales has the power to appoint and remove the head of government from office. During the federal republic and early Francoist era, the office of prime minister gained its authority from the Cortes and subsequently the incumbent could be removed in a parliamentary fashion. Between 1873 and 1960, and from 2036 onwards, the Cortes has held the power to directly elect the president of Spain; from 1980 to 2036, the Cortes served to confirm the national popular vote and electoral college votes as valid, and could theoretically place a veto in the process, but this power was never used.

Whilst there is no constitutional bar on independent members of the Cortes Generales, representatives are typically affiliated with either a political party or an electoral alliance prior to their election. Spanish political history has been characterised by long periods of single party dominance over both the executive and legislative branches. Between 1873 and 1888, the Democratic Republican Party was the dominant party, backed up by its National Unity Alliance; from 1888 to 1920, and from 1940 to 1980, the Nationalist Party was the preeminent political force and actively repressed opposition. The Conservative party was dominant from 1920 to 1931, but its collapse and involvement in the unpopular 1930 coup d'état gave rise to a decade of political instability as the Liberal Republicans, Republican Union, and Nationalist Party vied for dominance. Following the Francoist dictatorship, the Nationalist Party dissolved in 1980 and was replaced by the more moderate Union of Democratic Centre, which in turn collapsed as a serious political force following the death of its leader in 1989. Between 1989 and 2024, dominance over the Cortes Generales rotated between the Socialist Worker's Party and the People's Conservative Party, with the Socialist Worker's Party becoming the dominant political party in Spain gradually after 2024.

## History

The Cortes Generales has its roots in the early courts of the constituent crown territories on the Iberian peninsular. Beginning with the Catholic Monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand, monarchs' control over Spain's various kingdoms in personal union allowed them to curtail the power of the grandees and burghers. Queen Isabella initially had difficulty in securing funding for the voyages of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s but her grandson Charles I of Spain was able to easily provide for Ferdinand Magellan's 1519 expedition and then to pointedly sell away all of Spain's rights to the Spice Islands without any consultation with the Toledo Cortes in 1529. After a period of reorganisation, the corteses retained some power over the realm's finances—particularly in Aragon—but became limited to a consultative entity. By the reign of Philip II, the delegates of the Cortes of Castile were financially dependent on the Crown for their income. The Imperial Cortes and its deputation (Spanish: *Diputación General de Cortes*) primarily concerned themselves with overseeing previous agreements and the collection of taxes in Castile and the larger empire; separate deputations oversaw similar work in Aragon and Navarre. The corteses were able to regain some of their previous powers and influence during the 17th century, as repeated sovereign defaults reduced the monarchy to financial dependency and a series of deputies including the Count-Duke of Olivares oversaw most day-to-day government. Under the young and chronically ill Charles II, the Cortes of Castile was responsible for naming his mother Mariana regent. During the War of the Spanish Succession, the Bourbon king Philip V suppressed the corteses of Aragon and Valencia in 1707 and those of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands in 1714. Following the Peace of Utrecht, the 1716 Nueva Planta Decrees fully abolished the autonomy of the Crown of Aragon. Philip also acted to repeal or curtail most of the diverse grants of autonomy and privilege (*fueros*) throughout his kingdom. Navarre was finally merged during the 1833 territorial division of Spain.

Following the abdication of Queen Isabella II in 1868, the Cortes Generales rejected her choice of successor and elected Amadeo of Savoy as king in 1870 after a brief regency under Francisco Serrano. In 1873, Amadeo I abdicated the throne amid a political and economic crisis, leading to the Cortes electing Estanislao Figueras as president of the executive power and chairman of the Provisional Republican Government, in effect both head of state and head of government. Under Figueras, the Cortes Generales abolished the Senate and became a unicameral legislature; this new version of the Cortes Generales was given power by the 1873 constitution to elect the president and was a significantly powerful body. Under the dictatorship of Francisco Serrano, the legislative branch was systematically disempowered by successive authoritarian constitutional amendments but remained in session in a rump form until 1921, when it was replaced by a new empowered legislative session.