ANALYSIS:"WE MUST find a way of circumventing the legal requirements," the president of the Spanish Partido Popular (PP) Miguel Arias Cañete said yesterday, urging that the government emerging from Sunday's elections should be formed as soon as possible. "Markets don't wait for chambers to be constituted or for ministers to be named."
His call was echoed by other voices in his own party and across the political spectrum. After last week’s close shave with EU intervention, most Spaniards are frustrated – and frightened – to recall that official protocol says that they must wait a month for the PP, with its convincing absolute majority, to engage with the euro zone crisis.
The prime minister-elect, Mariano Rajoy, is not normally a man to rush things. His style is sober, steady and reserved, the epitome of the deeply conservative politics he represents. He is a safe pair of hands, certainly, but he has not yet demonstrated the kind of energy that his baptism of fire now requires.
Power changes people, however, and his decisive election victory on Sunday gives him a new authority in his own party that he has lacked during eight years as leader of the opposition.
During this period, he has quietly but steadily shifted the PP away from the right-wing rhetoric of his colourful predecessor, José Maria Aznar. He has in particular brought younger women on to his team, like Maria Dolores de Cospedal, whom he made his deputy, and Soraya Saenz de Santamaria, his parliamentary spokeswoman, who do not fit the ultra-Catholic PP stereotype that alienates younger supporters and centre voters.
Yesterday, he put Saenz de Santamaria in charge of the now critical job of overseeing the transition from the outgoing Socialist Party (PSOE) government to a PP administration. Both she and de Cospedal are likely to have senior positions in his new cabinet.
Despite the apparently triumphant dimensions of his election victory, Rajoy knows that he faces a big problem in convincing that majority of Spaniards, who did not vote for the PP, that he really can govern in their interests.
His absolute majority obscures an important fact. The PP only gained 600,000 votes on Sunday compared to the 2004 election. The crucial point is that the PSOE lost a staggering four million-plus votes, and that most of them either stayed at home or transferred to harder left or radical regional nationalist options.
Many Spaniards will never vote for the PP, because they see the party not as a normal centre-right European option, but as the sometimes thinly disguised inheritors of the legacy of the dictatorship of General Franco who ruled Spain from 1936 until July 1974 when he handed over to King Juan Carlos as acting head of state. Franco died in November 1975 and Juan Carlos oversaw the restoration of democracy.
It was the potentially disaffected whom Rajoy addressed on Sunday night, when he said that “no one should be worried about our victory” and when he promised “to be a prime minister of all the Spaniards”. In saying this he surely is not only following his own inclinations, which are said to be centrist rather than right-wing, though no one seems quite sure.
He must also be painfully aware that he desperately needs the backing of a much broader spectrum of Spanish society than his deeply conservative core supporters.
Without such a consensus, he cannot successfully steer the country through the worst crisis it has seen since the transition from the dictatorship, implementing harsh and unpopular measures as he does so.
So his cabinet is also likely to include other socially liberal PP figures, like Rodrigo Rato, economics minister in the 1996-2004 PP governments.
Rato’s subsequent three years at the head of the International Monetary Fund also makes him a likely key member of the new government, though he is being tipped for the foreign ministry, and not the crucial economics “superministry” that Rajoy has promised.
Rajoy insists that he has already decided on who will hold this position but, true to his reserved character, also insists that he has not yet informed even his chosen appointee.
Many names are being suggested, including leading economists and technocrats not closely associated with the PP.
While Rajoy considers the barrage of challenges that face him, the ousted PSOE is reeling after the worst election result since Spain became a democracy.
The outgoing prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, yesterday announced that the party would hold a congress in February, but he faced many calls yesterday for his own immediate resignation as secretary general.
In the eyes of many PSOE members, Zapatero has not only chronically mismanaged the Spanish economy, he has also been a disastrous leader of his own party during his second period in office. After first appearing to favour the youthful and energetic minister for defence, Carme Chacón, as his successor, he then forced her to withdraw and imposed as prime ministerial candidate the utterly uncharismatic party fixer from the Felipe Gonzalez period, Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba.
The outcome is a map of Spain where the conservative blue dominates in almost every province, city and autonomous region outside Catalonia and the Basque country.