Votes give Spanish leader new clout, new problems

Spain\'s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy emerged Monday with new clout after his party won an election landslide in his home region of Galicia despite a deep recession and cut-backs. Voters in Galicia strengthened Rajoy\'s hand on Sunday as he weighed if and when to seek a eurozone rescue line to save the nation from runaway public debt and braved protests against his austere economic reforms. \"Galicia saves Rajoy,\" headlined the Barcelona-based daily La Vanguardia, arguing that the region had given the 57-year-old leader a new breath of life. Far from being punished in Sunday\'s regional vote, Rajoy\'s right-leaning Popular Party boosted its absolute majority from 38 to 41 seats of the 75-seat Galician parliament. The secretary general of the ruling party, Maria Dolores de Cospedal, said the election result vindicated Rajoy\'s spending cuts and tax rises. The results showed that \"austerity policies, although they may sometimes be difficult, are seen as necessary and indispensable by the citizens,\" she told a news conference on Monday evening. But the prime minister\'s problems grew on another front as separatist forces gained ground in another regional election Sunday in the northern Basque country. That vote gave power to nationalist and separatist forces and left Spain\'s two major parties, the Popular Party and the Socialists, in the dust. Separatist forces are surging, too, in the northeastern region of Catalonia, which goes to the polls on November 25. \"Five weeks from the Catalan elections, with a nationalist challenge on the table, Rajoy should learn the lessons which go far beyond the results of the regional elections,\" said the leading daily El Pais. \"The whole political panorama is taking place against the backdrop of an economic emergency, with Spain in full recession and awaiting a possible bailout of its economy.\" Anti-austerity protestors planned to demonstrate on Tuesday near the lower house of parliament in central Madrid, after a similar mass rally last month that prompted baton charges by police with arrests and injuries. Unions have called a general strike for November 14, the second such cross-sector action this year. The economic crisis and cuts in education and health are causing pain across Spain\'s 17 powerful regions. Those sentiments are especially raw in Catalonia but can also be felt in the Basque Country, which held its first regional vote since armed separatists ETA renounced the use of violence last year. The Basque Nationalist Party won 27 seats in the 75-seat Basque parliament, followed by a new separatist coalition, Euskal Herria Bildu, with 21 seats. That left around two-thirds of the assembly made up of nationalists. Leftist alliance Bildu filled the space left by the ETA-linked Batasuna party, outlawed in 2003, raising the question of whether the conservative Basque Nationalist Party will seek an alliance with Bildu. \"Rajoy has emerged clearly strengthened from the Galician elections,\" said Antonio Losada, political science professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela. \"It is clear that at the moment the electorate does not see any other economic policy and if there is one it does not believe it,\" Losada said. \"He has gained a strong dose of authority.\" At the same time, however, Rajoy faced great challenges after the Basque result and ahead of the Catalan election, he said. Polls point to big gains for the Catalan leader Artur Mas\'s ruling Convergence and Union party, which is promising a referendum on \"self determination\". \"Spain is left without any party with national reach,\" Losada said. \"Neither the Popular Party nor the Socialist Party can guarantee their party\'s dominance over the whole state. And that presents a serious problem in managing politics in Spain.\"