The PP's term of office was undermined by a constitutional crisis over the Catalan issue,[1] the result of a regional election held thereafter,[2] coupled with corruption scandals and protests with thousands of retirees demanding pension increases.

[8][9][10] Presiding over a minority government of 84 deputies, Pedro Sánchez struggled to maintain a working majority in the Congress with the support of the parties that had backed the no-confidence motion.

After the 2019 General State Budget was voted down by the Congress of Deputies on 13 February 2019 as a result of Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and Catalan European Democratic Party (PDeCAT) siding against the government, Sánchez called a snap election to be held on 28 April, one month ahead of the Super Sunday of local, regional, and European Parliament elections scheduled for 26 May.

The far-right Vox party entered Congress for the first time, but it failed to fulfill expectations by scoring 10.3% of the vote and 24 seats, which was less than was indicated in opinion polls during the run-up to the election.

The three-way split in the overall right-of-centre vote not only ended any chance of an Andalusian-inspired right-wing alliance, but it also ensured that Sánchez's PSOE would be the only party that could realistically form a government.

[22][23] For the Congress of Deputies, 348 seats were elected using the D'Hondt method and a closed list proportional representation, with an electoral threshold of three percent of valid votes—which included blank ballots—being applied in each constituency.

The prime minister had the prerogative to propose the monarch to dissolve both chambers at any given time—either jointly or separately—and call a snap election, provided that no motion of no confidence was in process, no state of emergency was in force and that dissolution did not occur before one year had elapsed since the previous one.

After the 2019 General State Budget was voted down by the Congress of Deputies on 13 February 2019, it was announced that Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez would be calling a snap election for April.

[37] The Cortes Generales were officially dissolved on 5 March 2019 after the publication of the dissolution decree in the BOE, setting the election date for 28 April and scheduling for both chambers to reconvene on 21 May.

Initial actions from the Parliament of Catalonia to approve two bills supporting a referendum and a legal framework for an independent Catalan state were suspended by the Constitutional Court of Spain.

[51][52][53] The Catalan parliament voted to unilaterally declare independence from Spain,[54] which resulted in the Spanish Senate enforcing Article 155 of the Constitution to remove the regional authorities and impose direct rule.

On 24 May 2018, the National Court found that the PP profited from the illegal kickbacks-for-contracts scheme of the Gürtel case, confirming the existence of an illegal accounting and financing structure that had run in parallel with the party's official one since 1989 and ruling that the PP helped establish "a genuine and effective system of institutional corruption through the manipulation of central, autonomous and local public procurement".

[4] This event prompted the PSOE to submit a motion of no confidence in Rajoy and in Cs withdrawing its support from the government and demanding the immediate calling of an early election.

[5][6] An absolute majority of 180 MPs in the Congress of Deputies voted to oust Mariano Rajoy from power on 1 June 2018, replaced him as prime minister with PSOE's Pedro Sánchez.

Other general causes of ineligibility were imposed on members of the Spanish royal family; the president and members of the Constitutional Court, the General Council of the Judiciary, the Supreme Court, the Council of State, the Court of Auditors and the Economic and Social Council; the Ombudsman; the State's Attorney General; high-ranking members—undersecretaries, secretaries-general, directors-general and chiefs of staff—of Spanish government departments, the Prime Minister's Office, government delegations, the Social Security and other government agencies; heads of diplomatic missions in foreign states or international organizations; judges and public prosecutors in active service; Armed Forces and police corps personnel in active service; members of electoral commissions; the chair of RTVE; the director of the Electoral Register Office; the governor and deputy governor of the Bank of Spain; the chairs of the Official Credit Institute and other official credit institutions; and members of the Nuclear Safety Council; as well as a number of territorial-level officers in the aforementioned government bodies and institutions being barred from running, during their tenure of office, in constituencies within the whole or part of their respective area of jurisdiction.

[73][74] Disqualification provisions for the Cortes Generales extended to any employee of a foreign state and to members of regional governments, as well as the impossibility of running simultaneously as candidate for both the Congress and Senate.

Concurrently, parties, federations or coalitions that had not obtained a mandate in either chamber of the Cortes at the preceding election were required to secure the signature of at least 0.1 percent of electors in the aforementioned constituencies.

The election resulted in a victory for Pedro Sánchez's Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE)—its first since the 2008 general election—which swept the country and won in most constituencies and regions.

[152] Pablo Casado, the PP leader whose right-wing stance and controversial leadership had been labelled by commentators as a "suicide" in light of election results,[153] refused to resign and instead proposed a sudden U-turn of the party back into the centre under pressure from party regional leaders one month ahead of the regional and local elections[154][155] while also raising a hostile profile to both Cs and Vox, attacking them for dividing the vote to the right-of-centre.