2021 Catalan regional election

The 2021 Catalan regional election was held on Sunday, 14 February 2021, to elect the 13th Parliament of the autonomous community of Catalonia. All 135 seats in the Parliament were up for election.

After the 2017 election, pro-Catalan independence parties secured a parliamentary majority, electing Quim Torra as new Catalan president after attempts to have Carles Puigdemont and Jordi Turull elected to the office were foiled by Spanish courts. However, in December 2019 Torra was disqualified by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) from holding any elected office and/or from exercising government powers for disobeying the Central Electoral Commission (JEC)'s rulings in the April 2019 Spanish general election campaign. Torra remained as president as he appealed the ruling, but was stripped from his status as legislator in the Catalan parliament. A snap election loomed over the horizon for several months as Torra announced his will to call one after the court rulings, but the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain stalled these plans. On 28 September 2020, the TSJC's ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court of Spain, finally disqualifying Torra from office and paving the way for a regional election to be called for early 2021.

Puigdemont announced his intention to lead the lists of his new Together for Catalonia (JxCat) party into the election, with former regional Culture minister Laura Borràs being selected as presidential candidate. Concurrently, in a move widely seen as Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's personal bet for his party to obtain a strong performance in the election, the Socialists' Party of Catalonia (PSC) selected health minister Salvador Illa, who had been at the helm of the Spanish government's response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, as its leading candidate.

Pro-independence parties gained a majority of the votes for the first time in an election and increased their parliamentary majority, though they lost over 600,000 votes from the previous elections amidst the lowest voter turnout in history, at just 51.3%. The PSC under Salvador Illa emerged as the largest political party in a Catalan regional election in both votes and seats for the first time in history. The far-right Vox placed fourth and entered Parliament for first time, winning 11 seats, to the collapse of both Citizens (which placed first in the previous election and fell to seventh, losing 30 seats) and the People's Party (which worsened its 2017 result, already its worst in history). The Catalan European Democratic Party (PDeCAT), the successor of the once-dominant Democratic Convergence of Catalonia (CDC), lost parliamentary representation after they failed to clear the electoral threshold. PDeCAT's extraparliamentary performance partially overturned the record for wasted votes (in vote share, but not raw votes) that had been set by CDC's erstwhile coalition partner, the Democratic Union of Catalonia (UDC), in 2015.