Barcelona is heading towards having two extra councilors in the year 2027

BarcelonaIf there is no unexpected plot twist, the Barcelona City Council plenary will be transformed in the 2027 elections. And not only because of the redefinition of majorities that elections always entail, but because this time everything indicates that the plenary council of the Catalan capital will gain two councilors. In this way, Barcelonans will go from electing 43 representatives instead of 41. The reason? That since 2024 the city has consolidated its population above the barrier of 1.7 million.

Behind this phenomenon is the organic law of the general electoral regime (Loreg), which establishes that the number of representatives to be elected in each election will be defined according to the population registered in the official census. The table goes up to municipalities between 50,000 and 100,000, which can elect 25 councilors. In the case of large cities, the regulations establish that they gain a councilor when they reach 100,001 inhabitants and, from there, every additional 100,000 inhabitants. To avoid possible ties, it also defines that the number of councilors is always odd.

In this way, by exceeding the threshold of 1.7 million inhabitants – a milestone it reached in January 2024 and has since consolidated –, Barcelona meets the requirements to gain two more councilors in the municipal elections of May 2027. It will thus return to a scenario that the Catalan capital has not experienced since 1995, when the population decline that the city had registered since the early nineties caused the council to lose the 43 councilors it had had since the 1979 elections – the first since the recovery of democracy – and to have 41.

The change will also mean that 22 councilors – and not 21 as until now – will be needed to obtain an absolute majority of the plenary. A fact that could be key, especially if, as the polls predict, the city is heading towards a more fragmented plenary. Despite the possibility of growing by two councilors in the next elections, Barcelona remains far from the city council with the most councilors in Spain, which is Madrid with 57 councilors. Behind it is the Catalan capital, with 41 which could be 43, and further away is Valencia, with 33, or Zaragoza and Seville, with 31.

A census that is falling

The paradox of Barcelona's situation is that the population increase that justifies the growth in employment is not linked to an increase in the electoral roll. On the contrary. The electoral roll has not stopped falling since 1999 despite the more or less sustained population growth that the city has experienced since it hit rock bottom in the late nineties as a consequence of low birth rates, an aging population, and residents moving to other surrounding cities.

Thus, if in the last municipal elections of the 20th century there were 1,352,715 Barcelonians with the right to vote – within a population of 1.5 million people at the time –, in the last elections in 2023 the electoral roll was only 1,109,116 voters, even though the city's register already had 1,660,000 registered people. The reason for this discrepancy lies behind the main factor explaining the demographic growth the city has experienced in the last twenty years: immigration.

Although some of those born abroad can vote in municipal elections – if they have become Spanish citizens, if they are from European Union countries, or if they are part of one of the thirteen states with which Spain has signed a bilateral agreement, such as Bolivia, Chile, Korea, New Zealand, and Peru –, many of Barcelona's new residents are left off the electoral roll. According to the register, on January 1, 2025, there were 612,529 people born outside of Spain registered in the Catalan capital.