Spain election: Conservatives fail to win majority, cannot yet form government
Constitution says a party must win over 50% in a Parliamentary vote of confidence to take office
Spaniards headed to the polls Sunday for an unprecedented repeat election that failed to break six months of political deadlock as again no party managed to win a majority.
Public anger at high unemployment, cuts in government spending on services such as welfare and education and unrelenting political corruption scandals have shaped the two-week election campaign.
Spain's Interior Ministry says 92 per cent of the votes have been officially counted in the country's repeat election and the conservative Popular Party leads with 32 per cent of the vote.
That would likely consign Spain to more protracted political negotiations and possibly even another election.
The Popular Party has at least 136 seats in the 350-seat Parliament, but not a majority of 176 seats it needs to form a government on its own.
The ministry says the center-left Socialist Party is in second place with 23 per cent of the vote and 86 seats.
The Popular Party, led by incumbent prime minister Mariano Rajoy, governed from 2011 to 2015 and had hoped to be re-elected. An election last December didn't give any single party a majority. Six months of negotiations between the parties failed to produce a government, forcing Sunday's new ballot.
According to the Spanish Constitution, a government must win a vote of confidence in Parliament with more than 50 per cent of the possible 350 votes before taking office. If it misses that, in a second vote 48 hours later it must get 50 per cent of only the votes that are cast, a lower bar that allows parties to abstain and let another party into power in return for concessions.
A new round of political negotiations could be complicated by support for a new far-left alliance called Unidos Podemos (United We Can). That group includes radical leftist party Podemos along with the communists and the Greens. That would push the centre-left Socialist Party, which has traditionally alternated in power with the Popular Party, into third place. The business-friendly Ciudadanos (Citizens) party was expected to come fourth.
The election in Spain came four days after the U.K. voted in a referendum to leave the 28-nation European Union. But Antonio Barroso, a London-based analyst with the Teneo Intelligence political risk consultancy, said it's "unlikely" the Brexit decision would have much of an influence on the Spanish election.
Polls closed at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT) for Spain's roughly 36.5 million voters.
As of 6:30 p.m. Sunday, turnout stood at about 51.2 per cent, a significant seven-point decrease from the 58.2 December number during that time period.
'I'm voting for change'
Outside a Madrid polling station, many voters said they wanted Sunday's election to bring a break with the past.
"I'm voting for change, so that our politicians understand that we don't agree with what they've been doing," said Maria Jesus Genovar, a 47-year-old teacher who was supporting Unidos Podemos.
Unidos Podemos wants to improve job security, increase the minimum wage and strengthen the welfare state and other public services.
But Maria Jose Escos, a 59-year-old government worker, said she had no appetite for the new parties that upended Spain's traditional two-party system in December.
"I'd like everything to be like it was before," she said, adding she would back the Socialists.
After the December election, Rajoy couldn't get enough support from rival parties to form either a minority government or a coalition. The negotiations between the parties dragged on for months as Pedro Sanchez, leader of the second-placed Socialists, also failed to clinch a deal that would let him govern.
Part of the difficulty is that Spain has never had a coalition government.
Pablo Iglesias, the college professor who leads Unidos Podemos, has repeatedly said he wants a pact with the Socialists in order to oust Rajoy. But a major sticking point is Iglesias's insistence on letting the powerful northeastern region of Catalonia stage an independence referendum - a possibility that has been rejected outright by all other main political parties.
Ciudadanos is willing to talk to both the Popular Party and the Socialists but want no deal with Unidos Podemos.
Besides tensions over Catalonia, Spanish politics has been dominated by a national unemployment rate of more than 20 per cent for nearly seven years - the second-highest in the EU after Greece - and an unrelenting stream of corruption scandals, mostly involving the Popular Party and the Socialists.