President of the Community of Madrid


The President of the Community of Madrid is the highest-ranking officer of the Autonomous Community of Madrid and the head of the Executive Branch. The office is currently held by Isabel Díaz Ayuso of the People's Party.

Origins and election

In the process of the democracy restoration in Spain between 1975-1978, the nationalist and regionalist parties pressed to grant home rule to parts of Spain. Finally, the Constitution stated that any province or group of provinces could form an autonomous community and thus be granted partial home rule. The Autonomous Community of Madrid was created in 1982, and since then regional elections are held every 4 years.
The citizens of the Autonomous Communities of Spain do not elect a person for presidency of their community: but rather they elect the regional legislature, and that legislature elects the regional President. A candidate needs a majority to be elected, but the top-voted party can be denied the right to form the government. This situation, though infrequent in nationwide elections, often happens in local/regional legislatures throughout Spain: the most usual coalition is between the Socialist Party and the United Left.
In Madrid, such a coalition was formed in the 2nd term, in which the incumbent Socialist Joaquín Leguina obtained the most vote but not a majority, once more in the 3rd term, allowing him to remain in office even after having obtained fewer votes than the People's Party, and once more in the 6th term, by the PSOE candidate Rafael Simancas. However, this last coalition [|ultimately failed] due to the dissidence of two PSOE Assembly Members, which denounced the pact with IU as being too wide and unrepresentative of the people's will due to the planned power balance. Elections were repeated after a few weeks and Partido Popular won, then by absolute majority.
Since then, the People's Party victories by absolute majority were repeated in 2007 and 2011's regional elections. After the resignation of President Esperanza Aguirre, nominally due to personal matters in late 2012, her deputy president Ignacio González González held the post. The People's Party obtained the most votes in 2015 but lost its absolute majority. Its candidate Cristina Cifuentes was invested President after an agreement with Citizens.
She was replaced by her deputy Ángel Garrido when she resigned after evidence of both a fake master's degree and petty shoplifting came out.

List of officeholders

Timeline from 1983


  1. Todas las longitudes se miden en píxeles
ImageSize = width:600 height:600 #Tamaño de la imagen: ancho, alto
PlotArea = width:50 height:580 left:50 bottom:10 #Tamaño de la gráfica en sí dentro de la imagen: ancho, alto, margen izquierdo, margen derecho
DateFormat = yyyy #Formato de fechas= y-cifra de año, m-cifra de mes, d-cifra de día
Period = from:1983 till:2024 #Período de tiempo representado: desde, hasta
TimeAxis = orientation:vertical #Orientación del eje de tiempos: horizontal o vertical
ScaleMajor = unit:year increment:1 start:1983 #Escala
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  2. que moverlas a mano con la variable $dx
Define $dx = 20 # shift text to right side of bar
PlotData=
  1. barra, color, ancho, alineamiento, tamaño de fuente
bar:Líderes color:blue width:25 mark: align:left fontsize:M
#desde hasta desplazamiento texto y enlace
from:1983 till:1995 shift: color:red text: Joaquín Leguina
from:1995 till:2003 shift: color:blue text:Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón
from:2003 till:2012 shift: color:blue text:Esperanza Aguirre
from:2012 till:2015 shift: color:blue text:Ignacio González
from:2015 till:2018 shift: color:blue text:Cristina Cifuentes
from:2018 till:2019 shift: color:blue text:Ángel Garrido
from:2019 till:2023 shift: color:blue text:Isabel Díaz Ayuso