Opposition party poised for big win in Spain

MADRID (AP):

Spaniards hit by the highest unemployment rate in the eurozone voted yesterday in an election expected to give a landslide victory to opposition conservatives who have vowed to prevent the zone's fourth-largest economy from imploding but have offered scant details on how they will do so.

Exit polls show the conservatives defeating the ruling Socialist party.

The vote came as Europe is engulfed in a debt crisis that is causing financial havoc across the globe, and polls showed that Spain was poised to become the third European country in as many weeks to throw out its governing party, following Greece and Italy.

Ireland and Portugal - which like Greece received huge bailouts to avoid default - have also seen their governments change hands because of the crisis.

Spanish opposition leader Mariano Rajoy and his Popular Party are expected to win control of Parliament and oust the ruling Socialists but Rajoy has said little - other than lower taxes on small- and medium-size companies - on what his party would do to fight Spain's 21.5 per cent jobless rate and precisely what kind of austerity measures he would enact.

A win for Rajoy, 56, would bring the conservatives back to power after nearly eight years of rule by Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

On social policy, Zapatero put a patently liberal stamp on traditionally Catholic Spain by legalising gay marriage and ushering in other northern European-style reforms.

But on economic matters he has been widely criticised as first denying, then reacting late and erratically, to Spain's slice of the global financial crisis and the implosion of a real estate bubble that had fuelled Spanish GDP growth robustly for nearly a decade.

Zapatero slumped so badly in popularity that he decided not to run for a new term, and former Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba - a veteran figure and powerful force within the party - emerged as the candidate to succeed him.

The outgoing premier was jeered and cheered by people on the street outside his polling station in Madrid as he left in his motorcade after voting.