Oct
15
MADRID, Oct. 15 — With less than a week to the elections for the regional parliaments in the Basque Country and Galicia, the opinion polls made mixed reading for Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
Rajoy stated in an electoral act on Sunday that Galicia was “vital” for the government of his right wing Popular Party as holding on to the Galician Parliament could be seen as a positive reception for his policies.
Opinion polls in the traditionally conservative far north-west region have predicted the PP candidate Alberto Feijoo to maintain and perhaps even increase his narrow 1-seat majority in the 75 seat Galician parliament.
The most recent poll gives Feijoo 39 seats as opposed to the 38 seats he won in the previous elections which were held in 2009.
The poll shows that the Socialist (PSOE) Party has still to recover from its humiliation in the November 2011 General Elections. The PSOE would lose four seats from the 25 seats it won in 2009, with the majority of those going to Alternative Galega de Esquerda, who would break into the parliament with five seats, won at the expense of the PSOE and Galician Nationalists, BNG.
However, Rajoy will not be able to rest easy until polling on Sunday given that 40 percent of voters have declared themselves to be so far, undecided and there is still time for a late swing which would destroy the PP majority.
At the moment, then the polls show that PP support is more or less constant, whereas the opposition to the government is becoming more radical given the lack of a strong opposition voice from the PSOE, where Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba is being once again shown to not be the man to lead his party back into electoral contention.
The polls from the Basque country (Euskadi) make less comfortable reading for Rajoy and also for Rubalcaba, given that both PSOE and PP are expected to suffer losses to Basque nationalist parties, PNV and Bildu ,with the PSOE suffering an especially heavy defeat.
If the results of this Sunday’s poll are carried through to the election, the PSOE will lose around 10 seats, dropping from its current number of 25 to just 16 or 15. The PP meanwhile will see its representation drop from 13 down to 10. That means the two central Spanish parties will no longer be able to pact to form a government in the region as they have for the past three years.
Moderate Basque nationalists PNV would become the biggest party in the Basque Parliament, although with fewer seats than before, while radical nationalist, Bildu, who are allowed to stand in these elections for the first time, would claim 21 seats and become the region’s second political force.
That would give Basque nationalist groupings, all be it of different ideologies, a large majority in parliament, something that will worry Madrid ahead of the Catalan elections in November, when Artur Mas and his Catalan Nationalists, CiU are expected to sweep to power with the promise of a referendum on Catalan independence.
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