Economy, apathy pose threats to Spain’s ruling Socialists

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Madrid, Mar 6: A stuttering Spanish economy and voter apathy pose the main threats to the ruling Socialists' grip on power in an election on Sunday.

With the latest polls published in Spain on Monday putting the Socialists 4 points ahead of the conservative Popular Party (PP), the government is trying to mobilise its supporters after a high turnout four years ago helped it to a surprise victory.

"We still haven't got this won," said Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero at a campaign meeting on Wednesday. "Everything depends on the turnout."

Support for the Socialists is running at less than 45%, short of the level needed to win a majority in parliament. The new government will almost certainly have to seek support from smaller parties like moderate nationalists from Catalonia or the Basque Country. Zapatero has relied on different groups of allies during his first term in power. Zapatero, who pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq and has legalised gay marriage, urged Spaniards to vote "for confidence and optimism, in favour of progress and the future."

The prime minister is courting young voters, who helped push overall turnout to an unusually high 76% in 2004 and bring the Socialists to power.

Young voters were motivated by outrage at the reaction of the PP government to Islamist bombings on Madrid trains three days before the 2004 election. The PP, which had taken Spain into the highly unpopular Iraq war, blamed Basque separatists for the attacks which killed 191 people.

PP leader Mariano Rajoy, defeated as candidate in 2004, has focused campaigning on calls for stricter controls on immigration and on signs that Spain's economy has run into trouble after 14 years of economic growth.

"If you're better off now than you were 4 years ago, vote for Zapatero, if you're worse off, change and vote for the PP," Rajoy told a rally in Catalonia. He was accompanied by Rodrigo Rato, former head of the International Monetary Fund who was economy minister during the PP government from 1996-2004. "I'm going to follow Rodrigo Rato's economic policies," said Rajoy, who is promising tax cuts for low wage earners and companies.

Rising unemployment and a property slowdown have not so far significantly damaged support for the Socialists, who have blamed world financial markets for the economy's ills. However, a slowing economy will prove an uncomfortable inheritance for the next government.

Spain's heady economic growth of the past 14 years has been fuelled by easy credit and a house price boom, both of which have vanished in a matter of months. But, while unemployment has jumped by 240,000 in a year to 2.3 million, the rate is still low by the standards of recent decades in Spain.