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PP Storms to a Crushing Election Win
(Reuters) - Spain's center-right opposition stormed to a crushing election victory on Sunday 20 November 2011 as voters punished the outgoing Socialist government for the worst economic crisis in generations.
The People's Party, led by former Interior Minister Mariano Rajoy, won an absolute majority in parliament and is expected to push through drastic measures to try to prevent Spain being sucked deeper into a debt storm threatening the whole euro zone.
Voters vented their rage on the Socialists, who led the country from boom to bust in seven years in charge. With 5 million people out of work, the European Union's highest jobless rate, Spain is heading into its second recession in four years.
Spaniards, who voted in pouring rain Sunday, were the fifth European nation to throw out their leaders because of the spreading euro zone crisis, following Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Italy.
The PP won the biggest majority for any party in three decades, taking 186 seats in the 350-seat lower house, according to official results with 98 percent of the vote counted.
The Socialists slumped to 111 seats from 169 in the outgoing parliament, their worst showing in 30 years.
Rajoy's bitter medicine for the economy will probably make things worse before they get better. But he has said Spaniards are prepared for the painful austerity that is needed to reduce a swollen public deficit threatening to push the euro zone's fourth economy toward a perilous bailout.
"I ask you all to keep helping me. Difficult times are coming," Rajoy, 56, told ecstatic supporters in his victory speech at PP headquarters.
"Spain's voice must be respected again in Brussels and Frankfurt... We will stop being part of the problem and will be part of the solution."
