[rebelmouse-image 27089045 alt="""" original_size="750x958" expand=1]
La Razon, May 25, 2015
"Instability," reads the Monday headline of conservative Madrid daily La Razon, after the strong showing of two upstart parties in Spain's local and regional elections threatened the longstanding two-party duel between the Popular and Socialist parties.
The conservative Popular party of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy suffered its worst local results in a generation, losing some of its support in Sunday's voting to the new center-right Ciudadanos party. The Popular party paid the price both for its economic austerity measures and for ongoing corruption scandals.
The biggest breakthrough was for the year-old left-leaning Podemos party, which sprang from 2011's popular "Los Indignados" movement that denounced economic policies as serving the wealthy few.
Ada Colau, an anti-poverty activist backed by Podemos, was elected mayor of Barcelona. The city's leading daily La Vanguardia characterized Colau's election as "Radical Change," an overall shift to the left across the country.
In the capital, 71-year-old former judge Manuela Carmena and her coalition Ahora Madrid, also backed by Podemos, scored surprisingly well, and could enter Madrid's city hall if it can pull together a coalition majority.
Nationwide, the landscape is indeed unstable and unclear after 40 years of the Popular and Socialist parties battling head-to-head following the end of the dictatorship in the early 1970s. Political leaders in a majority of regions will have to form coalitions for the first time to form a ruling majority.
Meanwhile, Rajoy, whose party lost 10% of the support it garnered in the previous vote, faces an uphill battle to win a second term in national elections slated later this year.
ABOUT THE SOURCE: La Razon is a conservative daily newspaper based in Madrid with local editions in many other Spanish cities, including Barcelona or Seville.
