Spanish king makes final bid to broker deal on new government

Spain’s King Felipe VI met political leaders on Monday in a last bid to get them to form a coalition government — and avoid calling the country’s second general election in six months.

The monarch will wrap up the talks — his third round since an inconclusive December 20 election — on Tuesday by meeting acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who said over the weekend he was ready for new polls.

“I am in shape and eager and willing once again to do battle,” Rajoy told a party meeting Sunday in the southern city of Cordoba.

Parties have tried in vain to agree on a coalition government since the elections resulted in a hung parliament divided among four main groupings — none of them with enough seats to govern alone — as voters fed up with austerity, unemployment and corruption flocked to upstarts.

A new government must be in place by May 2, or the king must dissolve parliament and call a new election for June 26.

That would leave Spain, the eurozone’s fourth largest economy, without a fully functioning government for at least two more months.

– ‘New rules’ –

Barring a last-minute surprise, the king is expected to call the polls after his talks with Rajoy, whose conservative Popular Party (PP) came in first place in the election but lost its majority in parliament.

The election left Spain in uncharted waters as the country has never had a coalition government since it returned to democracy following the death of long-time dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.

Rajoy turned down a demand by the king to form a government due to a lack of support from other parties who shunned the PP because of its links to corruption scandals and its harsh austerity measures.

The king then turned to the Socialists, who came in second.

Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez then struck a deal on a government with centrist upstart Ciudadanos — but this did not give both parties enough seats to get a majority in parliament for the necessary vote of confidence.

So Sanchez tried to reach an agreement with new far-left party Podemos, whose 65 parliamentary seats would have got it through, but failed.

Ciudadanos, which came in fourth place, rejects many of the policies proposed by Podemos as being too radically left while Podemos, which came in third, sees Ciudadanos as too right-wing.

“Now that there is no more bipartisanship or absolute majorities, no one seems to master the new rules of the game, which are none other than dialogue, negotiating and reaching agreements,” the head of the Socialists’ Catalan faction, Miquel Iceta, told reporters on Friday.

– Stalemate set to continue –

The Spain standoff is the latest case of a European country enduring months without a government after inconclusive elections.

Belgium needed 541 days to form a government following a 2010 election, a European record.

But polls suggest fresh Spanish elections will not break the stalemate, with the results likely to be broadly similar to those of December.

The surveys show Podemos may lose votes as some of the five million people who backed the anti-austerity party last time accuse it of blocking the formation of a left-wing government that would have ousted the conservatives, in power since 2011.

To prevent this from happening, Podemos could forge an alliance with the smaller Izquierda Unida, a communist-green party headed by telegenic 30-year-old Alberto Garzon that got 800,000 votes in December.

The aim would be to surpass the Socialists in new elections, giving Podemos even more influence than it gained in December.

In a press conference after meeting the king Monday, Garzon said a last-minute surprise was unlikely.

“The feeling everyone has… is that tomorrow evening or Wednesday, a statement from the royal palace will say that elections will be called,” he said.

Belen Barreiro, a sociologist who heads the MyWord polling firm, said Spain was “divided into two blocks” made up of the PP and Ciudadanos on the centre-right and the Socialists, Podemos, Izquierda Unida and a collection of smaller parties on the centre-left.

“The question is how everything will move within the two blocks,” she told AFP.