2017 Aberdeen City Council election
The 2017 Aberdeen City Council election took place on 4 May 2017 to elect members of Aberdeen City Council. The election used the 13 wards created as a result of the Local Governance (Scotland) Act 2004, with each ward electing three or four Councillors using the single transferable vote system a form of proportional representation, with a total of 45 Councillors elected, an increase in two members from 2012.
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All 45 seats to Aberdeen City Council 23 seats needed for a majority | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Turnout | 37.6% | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The 13 multi-member wards | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Scottish National Party won 19 seats, the Scottish Conservatives won 11, Scottish Labour won nine, the Scottish Liberal Democrats won four and there were two independent members. On 11 May, the Lib Dems, ruled out entering into a formal coalition and instead would "consider every issue before the council on its merits on a case-by-case basis."
On 17 May, an agreement was reached to form a coalition between the Tories, Labour and the three independent councillors, up from two after councillor Jennifer Stewart resigned from the Liberal Democrat group to sit as an Independent and give the coalition an overall majority. The coalition agreed by Aberdeen's Labour councillors was without the party executive's approval and so the councillors were told to withdraw from the deal by 5pm on 17 May or face suspension. The deadline passed without any change to the coalition and as such, all 9 Labour councillors were suspended from the party.
In August, the co-leadership was ratified by a meeting of the full council, appointing Douglas Lumsden (Con) & Jenny Laing (Lab) as co-leaders.