When last we checked in on Spain, the country was struggling to make sense of largely inconclusive elections held in late December.
Mariano Rajoy’s PP managed to secure the most seats in parliament, but when the electoral smoke cleared it was apparent that Spanish voters were no longer content with the political status quo.
Back in September, we noted that the US was set to send 20 new nuclear bombs to Germany each of which has four times the destructive power of the explosive dropped on Hiroshima.
“[These] new attack options against Russia” constitute “a conscious provocation of [Germany’s] Russian neighbors,” one member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats warned. Sergei Lavrov’s de facto number-two, Maria Zakharova said the move represented an “infringement of Articles 1 and 2 of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”
“Today sees the start of a new political era,” Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias told supporters gathered in Madrid after Sunday’s largely inconclusive elections in Spain. “The forces of change are making a historic advance.”
Iglesias is certainly correct that things have changed. Spain’s three-decade old political duopoly was toppled over the weekend with PP and PSOE garnering their lowest combined share of the vote since the eighties.
Spain heads to the polls on Sunday in a historic election that may well spell the end of two-party dominance in a country racked by high unemployment and beset with corruption scandals.