Spanish election: Conservatives win but fall short of majority – as it happened

Let’s not forget about the senate, says Giles Tremlett, where 208 of 266 seats are up for grabs.

Questions, questions, questions ...

We’re still a little way from the end of the count, but here’s a first take on the results fo far from my colleague Ashifa Kassam in Madrid:

The conservative People’s party won Spain’s general election on Sunday but fell short of an absolute majority, as Spaniards fed up with corruption, austerity measures and double-digit unemployment voted to do away with the two-party dominance that has characterised modern Spanish politics.

With 84% of the votes counted, the PP was on track to receive 122 seats, leaving them shy of a majority in the 350-seat legislature. Led by Mariano Rajoy, the current prime minister, the party earned some 28% of the vote, leaving them with a third less seats than they received in the 2011 election.

The Socialists, who asserted throughout the campaign that they were best placed to rival the PP came in second, with preliminary results suggesting they could earn 93 seats and 22% of the vote.

Podemos was next with 69 seats and 20.5% of the vote while Ciudadanos was on track to win 38 seats and 14% of the vote. The results suggest Podemos capitalised on the campaign to gain votes, and that pollsters underestimated the anti-austerity party’s appeal while overestimating that of centre-right Ciudadanos.

With many in Spain still suffering the lingering effects of an economic crisis that sent unemployment rates soaring and triggered painful austerity measures, millions of voters turned away from the PP and Socialists, who have alternated in power for decades, and instead backed emerging parties. The PP and Socialists earned a combined vote share of around 50, as compared to the 70-80% in combined votes in past general elections.”The two-party political system is over and we are entering a new era in our country,” Podemos’ Iñigo Errejón said on Sunday as results began rolling in.

Podemos did notably well in Catalonia, suggesting widespread approval for its campaign promise to hold a referendum on independence for the northeastern region. Preliminary results suggested a coalition backed by Podemos and Barcelona en Comú was poised to take first place in the region.

The results could make Rajoy the first leader in Europe to be re-elected after imposing harsh austerity measures on his electorate. Rajoy’s success is an anomaly to many in Spain, given that he has been dogged by dismal popularity ratings -- in early December Rajoy ranked last among the leaders of six national parties with an average rating of 3.31 out of 10 -- as well as been implicated in a slush fund scandal that allegedly involved envelopes stuffed with cash handed over to senior figures in the PP.

Rajoy ran a careful campaign, opting to skip out on two televised debates and instead make appearances on lifestyle programs. In contrast to his rivals’ message of political and institutional transformation, Rajoy sought to position his party has the best-placed to keep the fragile economic recovery on track. Pointing to the 1 million jobs created in the past two years and Spain’s position as one of the fastest growing economies of the eurozone, Rajoy warned that change could risk derailing the tepid economic recovery. “Playing around with experiments and novelties is something that a country like this one ... cannot allow in any way,” Rajoy, 60, told supporters as the campaign drew a close on Friday. “To take a step backwards now, to return to the old, tired, boring policies ... would be an error that we can’t allow as a nation.”

In order to be able to govern for the next four years, the PP will have to rely on other parties, suggesting a protracted process of negotiations lie ahead for political leaders.

Several scenarios are possible. The PP could form a minority government, particularly since Ciudadanos leader Albert Rivera said last week his party would abstain from a vote of confidence in order to allow the party with the most seats to govern. The scenario is a risky one for the PP, as a minority government could fall easily, triggering new elections.

In the lead up to the election, many analysts had predicted that the new government would be made up of the PP in alliance with Ciudadanos. But the two parties together would still fall short of a majority. Any alliance between the two would require a third partner, a scenario that shifts some of the balance of power to regional parties from Catalonia and the Basque country and will be complicated by Ciudadanos vehement opposition to Catalan independence and insistence on eradicating longstanding Basque tax benefits.

A third option, echoing developments in Portugal, would be a coalition of the Socialists, Podemos and Ciudadanos. While Ciudadanos’ leader Rivera has said his party will not support what he called a “grouping of losers,” some analysts saw the possibility of a Socialist government emerging from Sunday’s vote. “Reaching a deal between the Socialists, Ciudadanos and Podemos is not going to be straightforward...but if the alternative is leaving the country’s without a government, the pressure will be on the parties,” Federico Santi, a London-based analyst with the Eurasia Group told the Associated Press.

Some of Sunday’s results can be explained by Spain’s electoral system, which gives more weight to votes from rural areas than urban ones. In Madrid, for example, where Podemos and Ciudadanos enjoy high levels of support, a candidate needs more than 128,000 votes to be elected, while in rural areas where the PP and Socialists traditionally dominate, a candidate could need as little as 38,685 votes, such as the province of Soria in Castilla y León.

The results were likely also influenced by a generational gap. As the clamour for change began in Spain, the median age of the country’s political leaders dropped drastically. The Socialists elected 43-year-old Pedro Sánchez as leader, while Ciudadanos’s turned to Albert Rivera, 36, and Podemos to 37-year-old Pablo Iglesias.

But Rajoy, 60, remains the most popular option with Spaniards over the age of 55, buoyed in part by his party’s consistent support for pensions. Even as his government was slashing spending for public wages, education and research, pensions were raised. Not only is this the demographic that is most likely to vote, it has also grown by more than a million people since the 2011 election, while those under the age of 34 years have dropped by almost a million.

As alluded to before, while Ciudadanos’ showing may not have lived up to some predictions, its seat count is still impressive.