Under the Restoration (1876-1923), local elections were held every three years. In the case of Madrid, each of the city's then-districts served as a multi-member district whose members were elected by what we would today call single non-transferable vote. All men over 21 could vote.
The Madrid City Council (Junta Municipal) formed the legislative and the executive together with the government-appointed Mayor (
Alcalde Presidente). The City Council was formed by 50 members (
concejales) who had six-year terms, as the City Council was elected in roughly halves, 28 and 22 each time. The official results only indicate the elected members and their affiliation, but not the vote margins, but luckily the national press tended to cover that, although discrepancies exist.
A note of caution, Spanish electoral law would not recognise political parties as legal entities until the Second Republic, so all party affiliations are self-reported.
In 1905, ABC reported that the elections were marked, other than in Chamberí, by
extremely low turnout and even lower interest. So much so that more critical (or neutral) commentators from the period than the openly conservative ABC reported that only the usual suspects' vote, aka people paid by the parties to vote their way or who held their jobs thanks to them, so clients.
Meanwhile, both 1909 elections were held under the new 1907 electoral law passed by the Maura Government. The law, besides making certain changes that do not matter much here (like elections by acclamation if there only one candidate standing) primarily served to introduce mandatory voting modelled on the Belgian 1896 electoral law. The Government also promised to study and present within a year a new constituency map, but it never did, so Spain continued using the exact same constituencies that it had been using since 1869.
Because of the change to the electoral law, both halves of the City Council were elected in 1909, one in May, and another one in December.
As for the political parties:
The
Fusionist Liberal Party (
Partido liberal fusionista), was the centre-left party created from the merger (
fusión, hence the name) of the disparate elements of the parties that governed during the monarchist phase of the Sexenio Democrático and the more moderate republicans around the figure of Práxedes Mateo-Sagasta y Escolar.
During the late 19th century, the liberals were anti-clerical, pro-free trade, pro-universal male suffrage, and favourable to greater freedom of the press, of academia and for more autonomy in the colonies. For that reason, the party found special support in the cereal-growing areas of Castilla and the fruit-growing areas of the Levant, as it was here that Spain's main exports were located.
However, by the turn of the century, after achieving universal suffrage in 1890, expanding academic freedom, freedom of speech and press and losing Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and coming around to support protectionism, the party had a very little ideology or coherence to offer. Indeed, after Sagasta's passing in 1903, the party would enter into tremendous internal bickering between its main personalities and their followers until the strong figure of José Canalejas Méndez.
Canalejas represented a new kind of liberal, more socially interventionist, more anti-clerical (he closed all convents with the Lock Law of 1910), abolished the extremely unpopular
consumo (a sales tax on basic goods like salt, bread, etc.) and introduced compulsory military service (eliminating the exemptions for the children of families that could afford to pay for a substitute) and almost passed a first pseudo-autonomous Catalan government. Unfortunately, he was murdered in 1912.
After his death, the Liberals entered a long period of internal fights between its members, around the key figures of the Count of Romanones ('
romanonistas'), the Marquis of Alhucemas ('democrats') or Santiago Alba Bonifaz ('
albistas' or 'Liberal Left').
The
Liberal-Conservative Party (
Partido liberal conservador) represented the centre-right of the two dynastic parties. The party was built from moderate conservatives and
alfonsistas around the figure of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo.
During the late 19th century, the conservatives believed in a close relationship with the Catholic Church (clericalism, without being Carlists), were protectionist, favoured a more active and harsher colonial policy, were opposed to suffrage extensions and were generally conservative on matters of academic and press freedom. For that reason, the party as favoured by Andalucian landowners as well as Catalan and Basque industrialists, whose businesses depended more on access to colonial markets and protection from foreign competition.
Similarly to the Liberals, following the loss of Cuba in 1898 and the assassination of Cánovas del Castillo in 1897, the party was bereft of new ideas other than protectionism (hardly different from the Liberals by then though) or clericalism. But fortunately for them, the party chose as its leader Franscisco Silvela y de Le Vielleuze and, after his untimely death in 1905, Antonio Maura y Montaner.
Both Silvela and Maura were '
regeneracionistas' or reformers if you will. And both came with a large programme of social, political and economic reform that was then known as the '
revolución desde arriba' (top-down revolution). Their ideology was democratic but, in the case of Maura, with the years began to shift towards more 1920s-style authoritarian socially-minded conservatism.
Maura served as Prime Minister between 1904 and 1905 and again between 1907 and 1909 (and then more times). But more importantly, Maura was forced to resign following the 'Tragic Week' when violent riots and even more violent repression shook Barcelona as a result of protests again the sending of draftees to fight in Morocco.
After his dismissal, Maura would lose power internally as another figure, that of Eduardo Dato e Iradier emerged. Dato was a more classical, almost British kind of conservative, socially-minded but in a parliamentarian mould, much less authoritarian in temperament and well-known for his ability to find compromises (Maura once quipped that if Dato ever met the Devil, he'd offer him a cigar before befriending him). Dato was also favoured by the Monarch to the point that his faction of the party was known as the 'idóneos' (the 'ideal ones').
The
Republicans, which at the time of these elections were not right a cohesive unit - even by the loose standards of the time. Unlike the Barcelona-based populist republicans led by Lerroux, the Madrid republicans were still basically a collection of disparate politicians to the left of the Liberal Party, some barely evolved from 19th-century café ideologues and some much more socially-minded.
The Republicans' key demand in this time period, besides the obvious one, was an extreme form of anti-clericalism, essentially drawn from French laiïcité, like a state-ran secular education system (banning religious instruction), closing down all convents, and so on.
The
Social Defence Committee (
Comité de Defensa Social) represented the non-Carlist far-right of the Spanish political spectrum in the early 20th century. The Committee was founded in 1903 by the Marquis of Comillas in Barcelona in response to the city's social upheaval and strong anarchist, republican agitation. The Committee was founded to "defend the social, moral and religious interests of all classes".
The Committee appeared in Madrid in 1907 thanks to the support of the Duke of Sotomayor. The electoral arm which ran in Madrid was famous for declaring itself as "absolutely and unconditionally subject to the [Papal] Encyclicals and Pastoral Letters".
And lastly, the
Spanish Socialist Worker's Party (
Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE) which, like the various Southern European socialist parties of the era was considerably more radical than the German one or Labour. Madrid was, together with Asturias and the Basque Country, one of the parties' strongholds, as here the working class was usually more educated and the PSOE was stronger among miners, 'labour aristocracy' and steelworkers (whereas the anarchists were strongest in Catalonia, amidst the textile industry workers, and in Andalucia).
The PSOE remained, under the Restauración, a fairly marginal and radical party, largely reliant on the cooperation and good will of the republicans, from which the party slowly copied their anti-clerical stances. The PSOE would not elect its first MP until 1910, and only thanks to running a joint slate of candidates with the Republicans.