Spain premier votes, has long lunch with family

Mariano Rajoy, the prime minister and leader of the centre-right Popular party, will once again command the biggest bloc in parliament, with exit polls predicting the PP would take 26.8 per cent of the vote and 114-118 out of 350 seats in the legislature.

But whether it will manage to do so – and with whom – remains a mystery as the main opposition Socialists are expected to come neck-and-neck with two upstart parties campaigning for change, the centrist Ciudadanos and anti-austerity Podemos.

There is no time limit for forming a government after the election but a drawn-out negotiation could cause problems for the reforms that have helped pull Spain out of recession and started to improve the country’s unemployment rate.

About one in three of the 36.5 million eligible voters said they would decide whom to support only at the very last minute.

This year, polls forecast the ruling party a weaker support among the voters, but the party is still in the lead.

The economy, corruption allegations and a separatist drive in the prosperous north-eastern region of Catalonia have been the dominant issues in the election.

A poll earlier this month confirmed that rejection of the PP is strongest among Spain’s younger generations; 58.2 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds said that “they would never vote for them”; and among 25- to 34-year-olds, that percentage rose to 64.2 per cent.

The fact that both Ciudadanos and Podemos have not been involved at elections on a national level before is also adding to the unpredictability, although the PP and the PSOE are expected to benefit from Spain’s system, which gives a higher proportion of seats to rural areas with fewer voters. “We have to give the new parties a chance”, said grey-haired truck driver Francisco Perez, 53, after voting for Podemos in L’Hospitalet de Lllobregat.

And yet virtually all opinion polls put the PP in the lead, even though no single party is likely to receive enough support to form a government on its own.

With 81 percent of the votes counted, the conservative Popular Party appears set to win 122 seats in the Congress, down from 185.

“The fact that a tectonic shift is about to shake up the Spanish political system is testified by the expected 80 percent turnout… compared to 69 percent in the 2011 election”, analysts at UniCredit say, calling Sunday’s polls “historic”.

Socialist chief Pedro Sanchez, 43, has promised to reinstate the rights of workers and immigrants whom he says the PP trampled on with its spending cuts, tax rises and controversial health reforms. To complicate matters further, Albert Rivera, the Ciudadanos leader, has said he will not back Mr Rajoy as prime minister but would rather abstain. The Podemos party itself was born from massive Madrid street protests in 2011 that drew mainly young Spaniards tired of corruption. His moderate, business-friendly policies plus a pledge to crack down on corruption have attracted voters.

“For the first time, those of us who didn’t experience the first democratic transition are experiencing a second one”, Rivera said.

As people turn out to vote in today’s elections in Spain, only one thing is certain … and that’s how uncertain this ballot has turned out to be.