Deadline nears for end to Spanish government deadlock

The conservative Popular Party (PP) and the liberal Ciudadanos are working around the clock to hammer out an agreement that will give Mariano Rajoy a chance of being voted in again as prime minister. A deal would end an eight-month political stalemate in Spain.

Next Wednesday, the Spanish congress of deputies is due to vote on the candidacy of Mr Rajoy, who is acting prime minister, to form a new government. The conservative leader requires an absolute majority in the 350-seat chamber and if he falls short, as is expected, he will face a second vote two days later, needing only more votes in favour than against.

A general election in December 2015 was inconclusive, triggering an unprecedented repeat of the ballot in June. Rajoy’s party (PP) was again the victor, gaining 14 seats, but fell well short of the majority it had held for the previous four years. The main opposition parties – the Socialists, the leftist Unidos Podemos and the liberal Ciudadanos – all lost ground, making Rajoy the obvious candidate to try to form a new administration. If a government is not formed by the end of October, a third election will be called in the space of a year, a prospect Rajoy describes as “madness”.

Impasse

The current impasse is due to the arrival of two new parties – Podemos and Ciudadanos – which have sought to break up more than three decades of two-party politics.

Rajoy’s PP has been negotiating a series of reforms with Ciudadanos in recent days, to secure its support in next week’s votes but not its participation in a future government.

The PP and Ciudadanos have 169 seats between them, plus a single vote from the Canarian Coalition – still short of the 176 majority. The abstention of the Socialists would be required to make Rajoy prime minister again, but that party has repeatedly vowed to vote against him, fearing a backlash from its own voters if it does not.

As the vote looms, tensions have emerged between the PP and Ciudadanos, with the latter claiming the conservatives have been dragging their feet on measures to combat corruption and scale back layers of regional bureaucracy.

"We'd like to give our 'yes' vote to Mariano Rajoy, but he needs to give us reason to," said Juan Carlos Girauta, of Ciudadanos, which has issued a deadline to the PP to close the pact by today or risk losing its support next week.

The negotiations, based on a series of measures proposed by Ciudadanos, have also covered job creation, labour contracts, education and poverty.

“The PP isn’t willing to give ground in the negotiations, but Ciudadanos hasn’t clearly identified what it wants in return from the PP,” said political scientist Pablo Simón, of Carlos III University. “Everything is going to depend not so much on the reforms that Ciudadanos agrees on with the PP but rather how it manages to sell them to the electorate.”

Ciudadanos has already backtracked on a pledge that it would not consider supporting Rajoy due to his failure to tackle corruption in his party.