REAL SOCIALISM

Spain's ruling Socialists won a second term in elections Sunday as voters brushed aside concerns over the slowing economy and soaring immigration and backed the party's liberal social reforms.

The victory was much narrower than socialists had hoped, and leaves Mr Zapatero well short of the absolute majority of 176 seats he craved. The victory amounts to an endorsement of his record reforms, and of conceding more powers to Spain's autonomous regions.

For Mr Rajoy, the second consecutive defeat marks a crushing setback and is likely to increase pressure on him to quit as party chief.

With the marginalisation of fringe parties, the results have produced what a disappointed leader of the United Left party Gaspar Llamazares called "a tsunami of bi-party-ism". Conservative regional nationalist parties including Catalonia's Convergence and Union and the Basque nationalists party held up however, with 10 and six seats respectively. The Galician Nationalist Bloc kept its two seats.

But support for radical nationalist groupings in Catalonia and the Basque Country crumbled. The pro-independence Catalan Republican Left slumped from eight to three seats. The pro-communist United Left (IU) dropped from five to two seats. Conservative regional parties in Aragon and Navarra also lost seats.

Socialists started celebrating at party headquarters in Madrid soon after polls closed, and within an hour the street outside was jammed with euphoric supporters. "Zapatero, you didn't fail us," they chanted.

Hundreds celebrated the victory amid a sea of red and white Socialist Party flags. With 99.95 percent of votes counted, his Socialist Party was predicted to secure 169 seats, short of the 176 need for an overall majority in the 350-member assembly, against 153 for the conservative opposition Popular Party (PP) of Mariano Rajoy.

In the last legislature, the Socialists had 164 seats and the PP 148.

Turnout was estimated to be 75.3 percent, close to the high 75.66 percent in general elections four years ago. In Senate elections the Popular Party lost one seat to 101 of the 208 seats at stake in the 264-seat upper house, with 99.42 percent of the votes counted.

Zapatero's socialists won eight more seats and now have 89 senators.

The record participation in March 2004 had also helped Zapatero, now 47, to score a surprise win over Rajoy, 52, three days after train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people.

Voters then were infuriated at the conservative government's insistence that ETA was to blame, even though evidence pointed to Islamic extremists angered by Madrid's role in the Iraq war.

Election campaigning was again suspended this time around, after a former municipal legislator, Isaias Carrasco, a Socialist, was shot dead Friday in the northern Basque region.

There have been no claims of responsibility, but police said the attack bore the hallmark of the Basque separatist group ETA, which has killed over 800 people in its nearly 40-year campaign for an independent homeland.

Spaniards on Saturday received an emotional plea to turn out and vote from Carrasco's daughter, as hundreds attended his funeral. Pictures of a grief-stricken Sandra Carrasco made the front pages of almost all Spanish newspapers on Sunday, and the conservative press had warned that it could help the Socialists.

The centre-left El Pais commented: "Some are already beginning to put out the idea that a bigger Socialist win than predicted by the opinion polls will be due to the killing of Isaias Carrasco."

During his four years in power, Zapatero has brought in sweeping social reforms, including same-sex marriage, fast-track divorce, laws to promote gender equality and an amnesty for undocumented workers.

The elections came as a decade-long economic expansion has begun to slow due to the international credit crunch which has hit Spain's key construction sector.

Rajoy, a former education and interior minister, has also accused the government of being soft on terrorism by launching failed peace talks with ETA.

Rajoy sought to put the best face on the defeat.

The PP "is the party that most progressed in Spain, in terms of votes and seats," he told cheering supporters at the party's headquarters in Madrid.

In regional elections in southern Andalusia, also held Sunday, the socialists lost five seats to 56 compared to the 2004 elections but maintained their overall majority in the 109-seat chamber, while the Popular Party won 10 more seats and will now have 47 in the regional assembly.

In addition to immediately removing Spanish troops from Iraq, Mr. Zapatero has legalized gay marriage, passed legislation that cracks down on domestic violence, and made gender parity mandatory within political parties. In 2005, his government offered residency permits to hundreds of thousands of previously undocumented immigrants who could prove they had a job.

The economy, which has faltered in the past few months after four years of unprecedented prosperity, was nevertheless on voters' minds. Although the Popular Party worked hard to promote their own economic policies and raise fears about the impact of immigration on the average Spaniard's financial well-being, its strategies were not as persuasive as Socialist promises to issue tax rebates and to subsidize housing.

Spain's governing Socialists won a second term in office but will again need the support of smaller parties to reboot a slowing economy and deal with Basque separatists after an election that left the country deeply divided politically.

With 99.9 percent of the vote counted in Sunday's election, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's party won 169 seats against 153 for the conservative opposition Popular Party of Mariano Rajoy.

The victory, although an improvement of five seats for the Socialists from the 2004 election, left the party seven short of a majority in the 350-seat parliament.

"A Second Opportunity," read the editorial headline in leading daily El Pais, which noted that the result increased the tendency toward a two-party nation.

The Socialists "will have to continue counting on external support," the paper said. Offers of help came quickly from the Basque Nationalist Party, which won six seats.

With more than 99 percent of the ballots counted, Mr. Zapatero’s party won 43.7 percent of the vote, and the conservative Popular Party 40.1 percent, according to the Interior Ministry. Turnout was high — an estimated 75.4 percent of the country’s 35 million eligible voters — only a shade below the 75.7 percent turnout in 2004.

The election was a rematch of the bitter contest four years ago between Mr. Zapatero and Mariano Rajoy, the head of the Popular Party.

Throughout the past four years, Mr. Rajoy and his party called into doubt Mr. Zapatero’s legitimacy and relentlessly tried to block his agenda.

So it was not surprising that in his speech conceding defeat Sunday night, Mr. Rajoy stood firm on principle, but said nothing about the need for national unity. “Everyone knows we are predictable,” he said. “Everyone knows what we stand for. Everyone knows what I believe in.”

The voting was overshadowed by the killing on Friday of a Socialist advocate in the Basque region, for which the government and the opposition blamed ETA, the militant outlawed Basque independence group. But it was too soon to say what effect the killing may have had on the vote.

In casting their ballots, many voters expressed both frustration with the petty infighting that has dominated the campaign and worry about the sudden downturn of the strong economy during the last year.

In the upscale Madrid neighborhood of Salamanca, Gloria Perez, a 58-year-old librarian, said the poor economic performance of Mr. Zapatero’s government prompted her to shift her vote this time to the United Left, the main Communist Party, from the Socialists.

“Zapatero has not done enough to bring down the price of rents, control mortgage costs, help young people and get us workers better salaries,” Ms. Perez said. She added that she was not impressed by tax incentives offered by the two main parties, including the Socialists’ promise of a 400-euro tax rebate, about $620, for all taxpayers.

“What good is 400 euros going to do me?” she said. “That’s bread today, hunger tomorrow. We need reforms that will help us in the long term: better work contracts, better salaries, less inflation.”

Other voters said they wanted to support Mr. Zapatero’s ambitious social and political agenda that has ushered in reforms like new rights for women and recognition for the victims of the Fascist Franco dictatorship.

“Zapatero has given us more rights than any leader to the people of Spain: the old, the young, gays, men, women,” said Santiago Cruz, 69, a retired plumber who lives in the working-class Madrid suburb of Vallecas, which has a large immigrant population. “I grew up under Franco with no rights. I grew up having to sing Franco’s anthem so that his Fascist supporters would throw me scraps of cabbage.”

Other voters claimed that Mr. Zapatero’s social reforms were destroying Spain’s value system.

“Zapatero is breaking with the traditional Christian values that we have espoused our whole lives,” said Miguel María Santos de Quevedo, a 76-year old retired notary in Tomares, a town in Andalucía, who said he voted for the Popular Party. “He wants to impose his relativist values on everyone, to claim that there is no such thing as good and bad.”

The election of the prime minister involves a complicated process in which voters do not vote for one candidate but for one party list of candidates for deputies in Parliament.

Voters had more than two dozen party lists from which to choose. A tiny new progressive party headed by a Socialist former lawmaker who broke with Mr. Zapatero because of his negotiations with ETA won one seat in Parliament, for example.

The rightist Falange, which opposes immigration and is devoted to preserving the memory of the late dictator Franco, also ran but failed to win a seat.