Spain

Spanish politics is a mess.

Everyone knew, going into last fall and winter, that the waters were about to get decidedly choppy. At the national level, Podemos was ascendant as Pablo Iglesias rode a wave of anti-austerity sentiment straight to the front of disaffected voters’ collective consciousness.

A nation beset by sky high unemployment had grown tired of the PP and PSOE duopoly that had dominated Spanish politics since at least the late 80s. Between Podemos and Ciudadanos, a shakeup was virtually assured.

A Spanish reader writes:

Like America, Spain today is plagued by populism, economic stagnation, social decadence, and rancor resulting from the erasure of history via the removal of historical monuments. Spain is also plagued by Catalan and Basque separatism. Basque separatism especially has reached a fever pitch.

While Asian stocks continued their longest rally since August overnight, led higher for the third consecutive day on the back of Japan (+1.3%), Australia (+1.2%) and China (+0.4%) strength, European stocks have as of this moment halted their longest rally since October (Stoxx -0.1%) and U.S. index futures are little changed.

Back In December, Spain held what turned out to be inconclusive elections.

To be sure, voters were clearly sick of the status quo. The country’s three decade old political duopoly was broken when PP and PSOE garnered their lowest combined share of the vote since the eighties.

Mariano Rajoy’s PP still won the most seats, but fell short of a majority and with a grand coalition comprised of PP and PSOE largely out of the question, the quest to build consensus and form a government has been stuck in the mud for two months.

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.