Spain’s conservatives win, but no majority

Without a clear victory, the People’s Party will need an ally in government. The Spanish general electi…

But the night belonged to Podemos, and its leader, the ponytailed Pablo Iglesias. “Traditional parties are likely to be challenged and could well lose their dominance”.

(AP Photo/Manu Fernandez). Pedro Sanchez, leader of the Socialist party speaks during the closing campaign rally in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, Dec. 18, 2015.

The polls cap a year of electoral change in southern Europe after Syriza was swept to power in Greece in January and a coalition of leftist parties in Portugal pooled their votes in parliament to unseat the conservative government after an inconclusive election in October.

It is feared that the country’s Socialist party and Podemos, the far-left group, which secured the second and third largest number of seats in yesterday’s election, could form an alliance.

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.

The opposition Socialists are predicted to come in second place followed by the anti-austerity Podemos.

It put support for the new business-friendly Ciudadanos party far behind the others at 15.2%.

But Podemos (with 20 percent of the votes and 69 seats) sees the Socialists as a loser party which they want to replace, not to give life to, after such a heavy defeat.

“A wind of change is blowing in Spain”, said Geoffrey Minne, an economist at ING Bank in Brussels.

The United Left’s two seats came despite them winning over 900,000 votes, the fifth most voted force in the elections.

Podemos has eaten away support for the center-left Socialists, threatening to end decades of two-party dominance in Spain of the Popular Party and the Socialist Party.

If exit polling is correct, the conservatives would be forced to form a coalition in order to govern for another four-year term.

A tie-up between the PP and Ciudadanos would yield 163 seats, far short of the 176 needed for a majority administration.

Voter turnout was 73.21 percent on Sunday, or almost 4.5 percent higher than in the 2011 general elections. He says it now falls to its leader Mariano Rajoy to try and form a government, even though the Popular Party did not obtain a parliamentary majority.

Other parties which will be represented in the new Congress are the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) which will have six seats, while Artur Mas’ pro-Catalan independence Democracy and Liberty will have eight.