Publicado en El País
Por Anabel Díaz, Marcos Sanz y Francisco Camas
14 de diciembre de 2015
Voter indecision and expected high
turnout means next Sunday’s election remains wide open
With one week to go before the Spanish general election, the latest poll shows voters torn between allegiance
to the country’s two traditional main parties – the Popular Party (PP) and the
Socialists (PSOE) – and the desire for change promised by newcomers
Podemos and Ciudadanos.
The four groups are predicted to share around 319 out
of the 350 parliamentary seats contested in an election that will see the
two-party hegemony that has dominated Spanish politics since the restoration of
democracy in the 1970s disputed for the first time.
Yet despite a powerful challenge built on the message
of generational change for a corrupt system, emerging parties Podemos and
Ciudadanos have yet to fully break the dominance of the PP, which stands to win
25.3% of the vote next Sunday, and the Socialists, which are expected to take
around 21%.
The latest survey conducted by polling firm
Metroscopia between December 7 and 10 shows the PP consolidating in first
position, the PSOE falling back slightly, Podemos gaining two percentage points
to reach 19.1 percent and Ciudadanos sliding significantly to 18.2 percent.
Despite the small difference in percentage points
between the contenders, Spain’s voting system is built to favor the two
most-voted forces. This means that the PP could get around 109 seats, the
Socialists 90, Podemos 60 and Ciudadanos another 60.
The 30-seat difference between the Socialists and
Podemos, despite a gap of less than two percentage points between them, is the
result of a system in which the province forms the basic electoral district,
making the general election the aggregate result of 50 partial elections.
While seats are shared out quite proportionally in the
bigger provinces, in the smaller ones the first two parties get a
disproportionate amount of seats to the detriment of the others. This is a
handicap for Podemos and Ciudadanos, which are particularly strong in the big
cities but have less of a foothold in smaller districts.
However, sociologists note that the outcome of next
Sunday’s election is still wide open as many voters remain undecided. Turnout
is expected to be extremely high – possibly around 80 percent, as high as at
the historic 1982 ballot, when a landslide Socialist victory institutionalized
the two-party system.
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