Spain: No clear winner in second election in six months

Spain’s political leaders are beginning talks on forming a government after a second election in six months again failed to provide a clear result.

The conservative Popular Party, which has ruled for the past four years, again collected the most votes in the election.

But it fell short of the majority of 176 seats it needed in the 350-seat Parliament to form a government on its own.

With 99.9% of the votes counted by late on Sunday, incumbent prime minister Mariano Rajoy’s party had picked up 137 seats in Parliament.

That was better than the 123 it won in December but still means it will need allies if it wants to govern; its earlier efforts to find support from rival parties after December proved fruitless.

Even so, Rajoy declared he would make a push for power, telling a victory rally in Madrid: “We won the election, we demand the right to govern.”

It is unlikely to be as simple as that, however. For the past six months, the main parties have quarrelled endlessly over who should assume power. In the end, King Felipe VI had to call another election.

A third one, in six months’ time, is still a possibility, as Spain has never had a coalition government.

The centre-left Socialist Party was second, collecting 85 seats. That was five fewer seats than six months ago but the Socialists kept their influence by fending off a challenge from a radical leftist alliance.

“We are the foremost political power on the left,” Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez told supporters in Madrid in his own bid to ensure political influence.

Unidos Podemos (United We Can) – which brings together Podemos, a two-year-old party that grew out of a grass roots anti-austerity protest movement, and the communists and the Greens – was third with 71 seats.

The alliance, headed by pony-tailed political science professor Pablo Iglesias, had hoped to overtake the Socialists and break the country’s traditional two-party system. The Popular Party and the Socialists have alternated in power for decades.

“We had expected to do better,” Iglesias said.

The business-friendly Ciudadanos party came in fourth with 32 seats. Other, smaller parties won the rest of the vote by Spain’s roughly 36.5 million voters.

Public anger at high unemployment, cuts in government spending on services such as welfare and education and unrelenting political corruption scandals shaped the two-week election campaign.

Iglesias has said he wants a pact with the Socialists in order to oust Rajoy.

But a major sticking point is his insistence on letting Catalonia stage an independence referendum – a possibility other main parties have rejected outright.

Ciudadanos is willing to talk to both the Popular Party and the Socialists but wants no deal with Unidos Podemos.

Besides tensions over Catalonia, Spanish politics has been dominated by a national unemployment rate of more than 20% and an unrelenting stream of corruption scandals, mostly involving members of the Popular Party and the Socialists.