SPAIN’S RULING Socialist Party headed for a crushing defeat in local elections yesterday,

SPAIN’S RULING Socialist Party headed for a crushing defeat in local elections yesterday, punished by voters after a week of mass public protests over high unemployment levels and a stagnant economy.

With 85 per cent of votes counted nationwide, the centre-right Popular Party had 37 per cent of the aggregate municipal vote.

The Socialists were 9 percentage points behind, heading for their worst showing in municipal elections since Spain returned to democracy in 1978 after the Franco dictatorship, and losing control of major cities including Seville and Barcelona.

The rest of the votes were divided among an array of smaller parties.

“We must congratulate the PP since they’ve won Spain’s municipal elections by a wide margin,” said deputy prime minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, who is widely seen as a possible Socialist candidate for the next parliamentary elections.

Tens of thousands of Spaniards fed up with the highest unemployment rate in the European Union – 21 per cent – demonstrated in cities around Spain all week, urging voters to reject the two main political parties.

Almost half of Spaniards aged 18-25 are out of work, more than double the European Union average.

On Saturday night their numbers peaked, with around 30,000 people in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol alone, witnesses said. Analysts said the protests would have only a marginal impact on the voting as opinion polls already showed Socialist defeats.

“I’ve voted for the PP because the Socialists are doing a very bad job . . . It’s true there’s been a worldwide crisis, but Zapatero didn’t react to it on time,” said Jesus Lopez, a retired man voting in the Arguelles neighbourhood of Madrid.

Spaniards were electing more than 8,000 city councils and 13 out of the country’s 17 regional legislatures. Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, applauded abroad for his fiscal discipline during the euro zone crisis, has become unpopular at home as the economy stagnates.

The youth protests across the country, organised through the internet by Spain’s Youth Awakening, and inspired by the uprisings in the Middle East, continued as polling took place. Demonstrators camped in the Plaza de la Puerta del Sol in central Madrid and in other cities defied a ban on protests by the election authority.

The demonstrators, who espouse a wide range of causes, including electoral reform, bank nationalisation, anarchism and state subsidies for the arts, were last night debating whether to continue the protest indefinitely.

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