Spaniards battling a deep recession voted yesterday in two snap regional elections that could deal a blow to Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
Rajoy’s right-leaning Popular Party has imposed tough austerity measures on the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy and now faces votes in the Prime Minister’s home region of Galicia and in the Basque Country.
The elections are full of risks for the Spanish leader as he agonizes over whether and when to snatch a eurozone rescue line to help finance the nation’s soaring public debt.
Many investors believe the prime minister is waiting to get the two votes out of the way before requesting a rescue, keeping world financial markets on edge.
In Galicia, which has 2.7 million eligible voters including 400,000 abroad, the Popular Party was defending a tight, absolute majority. Opinion polls gave it hopes of keeping power.
However, Rajoy risks a humiliating upset if his prescription of deep spending cuts and higher taxes causes voters in Galicia, where the unemployment rate is 21 percent, to punish his party.
Economic pain and cuts in education and health are fuelling discontent across the country’s 17 powerful regions.
In the Basque Country, a pro-independence coalition is expected to enjoy a surge in support in the first regional vote since armed separatists ETA renounced the use of bombs and guns.
One voter, 43-year-old engineer Inaki Arteaga, said both the economy and the new climate in the Basque Country weighed on his mind.
“These elections have two keys: the economy and the fact that this time anyone who wants to can vote,” he said.
A 60-year-old unemployed electrician, Elvira Saotua, said young people were desperate for jobs.
“It is very bad for the young people around here. Most of them don’t have work,” she said.
Rajoy, who is already struggling to contain pro-independence demands in Catalonia, which goes to the polls on Nov. 25, has urged Spaniards to stay united.
To vote for his Popular Party “is to bet on the values that unite all Spaniards — values that are the same for us in Galicia, in the Basque Country, Catalonia and all of Spain,” he said before the elections.
“There is a choice between stability, moderation and common sense, or confusion, uncertainty and constant stress,” he said.
The Basque Nationalist Party, a conservative nationalist party, was ahead in opinion polls before the Basque vote, in which nearly 1.8 million people are eligible to cast ballots.
However, a new coalition of left-wing Basque separatists, Euskal Herria Bildu, is likely to come second. The alliance has filled the space left by the ETA-linked Batasuna party, which was outlawed in 2003.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees