Upstart parties in Spain make major gains in parliamentary vote

MADRID – Spains governing center-right Popular Party, or PP, won Sundays general elections but came up well short of having an absolute majority in Parliament, while the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, or PSOE, finished second and the new Podemos party ended up third, with 99.43 percent of the ballots counted.

This epochal change is due to the fact that PP and the socialist party PSOE, who’ve swapped power between them since 1982, have gathered just 50 percent of the vote, when in the last election before the crisis (2008), they received a combined 84 percent of the vote.

It put support for the new business-friendly Ciudadanos party far behind the others, at 15.2 per cent. Jorge Clemente, spokesman for pollster TNS Demoscopia, said its figures are based on 180,000 face-to-face interviews.

The ruling Popular Party (PP) won most seats but lost command of the parliament after a strong showing by two smaller parties.

Popular Party leader and current Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy…

The trajectory of Podemos underscores that all of the political parties represented in the legislature are fundamentally hostile to the interests of the working class and support austerity and war.

Throughout the campaign, 60-year-old Rajoy said the party winning the most votes should take the lead in forming a government.

Spain could end up with a host of coalition government possibilities.

All the same, the party will make it into parliament.

Rivera appeared at the Eurobuilding Hotel just before midnight and spoke with the media, saying that his party would stake out the “new political center” in Spain. Nor can either easily find a sufficiently powerful coalition partner to form a government.

The country’s Socialists (PSOE), meanwhile, scored their worst result in modern history – challenged as they were by Podemos, which has skillfully managed to surf on the wave of exasperation over austerity and corruption that saw it emerge in the first place.

Spain’s 36.5 million registered voters are electing representatives to the 350-seat lower house of Parliament and to the Senate, which has less legislative power. In October 2015, the unemployment rate came in at 21.6 percent compared to 23.9 percent a year earlier, the second-highest rate in the European Union after Greece, although it has fallen from its 2013 peak of 27%.

This turnout rate is a few points up from the last elections in 2011, but identical to the average of the ten prior elections held in Spanish democracy since 1977.

After voting in a Barcelona suburb, Rivera said the election marks the start of a new era – especially for young Spaniards like himself, born after the nation’s 1939-1975 dictatorship.

Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias has said he would ask for major concessions from the Socialists before agreeing to any alliance.

“I would like things to change and for no party to get a majority so none of them will be able to do whatever it wants without listening to others”, said Agustin Aduriz, a 30-year-old engineer who voted in the Tribunal neighbourhood in Madrid.

“Now we have… the old versus the new”, she says.

Some of the voters choosing to support the new far-left Podemos party in Spain’s general election are young and disillusioned with the country’s two mainstream parties.