Back In December, Spain held what turned out to be inconclusive elections as voters clearly rejected the status quo with the country's lowest turnout in three decades. While incumbent Rajoy gained themost seats he was unable to get a majority and now four months later, King Felipe appears to have thrown in the towel on trying to bring the sides together in a working coalition. A new election for Spain is now inevitable in the summer after the king said no candidate counts with enough support to form a government – after a third round of talks between party leaders, the king won’t nominate a candidate, the Royal Palace said in a statement.
To be sure, voters were clearly sick of the status quo. The country’s three decade old political duopoly was broken when PP and PSOE garnered their lowest combined share of the vote since the eighties.
And now as AP reports,
A new election in June for Spain seemed all but inevitable Tuesday after the leader of the country's Socialist party said he was open to a last-minute deal for a coalition government proposed by a small leftist group but predicted he wouldn't get enough support to pull it off.
Pedro Sanchez said Spain is "doomed to a call for new elections" after meeting with King Felipe VI, who has spent the last two days with political leaders to determine whether he should pick one to try to form a government or set a fresh national election for June 26 in a bid to break four months of political paralysis.
The poll would happen six months after the last election on Dec. 20 that saw the downfall of the country's traditional two-party system as voters enraged by high unemployment, corruption and austerity cuts strongly supported two new upstart parties.
Felipe was expected to decide Tuesday night whether or not Spain will hold another election after meeting with acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who told the king on Tuesday for the second time since January that he doesn't have enough support among other parties to cobble together a government led by his conservative Popular Party.
Sanchez' declaration came after the small Compromis party floated a list of 30 proposals Tuesday to form a new government to rule in the 350-seat lower house of Parliament, and the Socialists said they could accept most of them.
The challenge in Spain for forming a government has come down to mathematical calculations on which party could win enough support in an election that saw the Popular Party come in first with 123 seats, the Socialists second with 90, the far-left Podemos party with 60, the business friendly Ciudadanos with 40 and a handful of smaller parties with the remaining 37 seats.
Sanchez had already struck a deal with Ciudadanos but in two votes last month was unable to convince Podemos and Compromis, which together have sway over 69 seats, to join them.
Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias said his group backed the last minute Compromis plan but that the Socialists' refusal to enter into a coalition of leftist forces excluding Ciudadanos meant the deal had little chance of success.
Ciudadanos leader Albert Rivera rejected the proposal outright and also predicted the country was headed for another election.
Polls suggest a repeat election — which would be a first for Spain since democracy was restored in 1978 — is unlikely to break the stalemate and could mean a political impasse stretching into the summer, possibly ending with another impasse and yet another election.
Spain has never had a coalition government at the national level. The Socialists rejected Rajoy's proposal for a grand coalition as has happened in many other European countries.
Additionally, The King asked parties on Monday to keep the costs of a new political campaign down, a sign he had little hope a viable pact could be found, and some leaders have already acknowledged they lack the support of rivals to secure a parliamentary majority.
In December's election, which produced the most fragmented result in decades, the center-right People's Party (PP) of caretaker Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy won 123 seats in the 350-seat lower house of parliament, while the Socialists took 90, Podemos 69 and Ciudadanos 40.
Although opinion polls suggest a new election would do little to resolve the deadlock, leaders have entered pre-campaign mode, blaming each other for the impasse which may start taking its toll on the economy more noticeably if Spain remains without a government for many more months.
So more political turmoil ahead in the periphery, turmoil which has the potential to rattle markets. But perhaps the most important thing to note about everything said above is this: a leftist-led government is now considerably more certain. It's only a matter of what form it will take. That means the religious adherence to Berlin-style fiscal rectitude is going to come to a rather unceremonious end sooner or later. That, in turn, means the relative calm shown in the following chart may well give way to carnage by the end of the year…
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