Spanish return to the polls as Rajoy refuses to end political impasse
AS SPANIARDS return to the polls today for the country’s second general election in six months, anti-establishment anger and growing political divisions are threatening to drag the Eurozone’s fourth-largest economy deeper into crisis.
Despite gaining no support from any other party after December’s ballot, which produced an insuperably hung parliament, Mariano Rajoy, the conservative prime minister, is resisting calls for him to step aside and unblock the political impasse in the key member state as the European Union teeters on the brink of meltdown following Britain’s referendum result.
“If we have a second election without a clear result, it will contribute to the existing sense of crisis in Europe,” Camino Mortera Martinez, a researcher from the Centre for European Reform, told “Brexit is the worst crisis imaginable and now the EU needs strong states to deal with what’s coming up.”
But Mr Rajoy was defiant before Popular Party (PP) supporters at Friday night’s campaign-closing rally. “This is not a time for experiments or to have interns running the government. Spain needs a leader who knows his job”.
Such “experiments” indeed could be another headache, albeit of a different order, for the EU. Brussels has been rattled by the astonishing rise of the anti-austerity, hard Left party Podemos, which since its founding two years ago has capitalised on widespread discontent with the political establishment to become one of Spain’s leading political forces.
While pro-European, Podemos, like its political ally Syriza in Greece, represents a challenge to the EU orthodoxy. Both are rebellious grassroots movements that are unwilling to be constrained by directives from Brussels.
In a thunderous speech on the other side of Madrid, Pablo Iglesias, the charismatic, pony-tailed Podemos leader, said it was time to eject the “corrupt and incompetent” PP from power.
“Corruption is a model of government that does not work, corruption is reducing the workforce and endangering pensions; corruption is implanting whatever Berlin tells us to do.”
The last opinion poll published by the newspaper before the survey blackout in the final week of campaigning suggested that the PP is heading for another narrow victory, somewhere around the 29 per cent it won in December, but with Podemos breathing down the ruling party’s neck on 26 per cent.
Tainted by corruption scandals that have reached into the highest echelons of his government, Mr Rajoy was also the lowest rated of the leaders of Spain’s four main parties.