The EU Is under Pressure - Spain, Portugal, Greece, France, Britain

Reuters reports that left-wing parties came close to winning an absolute majority of parliamentary seats in Spain's general election Sunday. Preliminary results show it is unlikely that Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's will win a second term for the People's Party (PP). The center-right PP got the most votes on Sunday but had its worst result ever in a general election as Spaniards, suffering what feels to them like a continuing recession because economic recovery hasn't helped them yet, abandoned the PP. And, the anti-austerity left-leaning Podemos party took third place in its first participation in a national election, beating fellow newcomer Ciudadanos whose market-friendly policies had been seen as a natural fit for a PP coalition. The unexpected Podemos surge tipped Spain to the left, with five left-wing parties led by the opposition Socialists and Podemos winning 175 seats, just one seat below the 176 needed for a parliamentary majority. A leftist alliance, according to Reuters, will not be easy to agree on as these groups differ on economic policy or on the degree of autonomy that Catalonia should enjoy. Ignacio Jurado, politics professor at York University, told Reuters : "The situation is highly complicated, I don't see an easy outcome. The PP will be the first to try and form a coalition but the left-wing bloc has more chances because they add up to more seats." The uncertain election result calls into question the EU economic reform program that helped pull Spain - the fifth-largest economy in the EU - out of recession but barely reduced a still +25% unemployment rate. Cobbling together a minority PP government is technically possible but not likely because of the strong showing of the leftist parties. And, the traditional PP and Socialists forcefully ruled out forming a grand coalition to form a government of national unity. ~~~~~ In Catalonia, the new left-wing Podemos party opposes a break-off of Catalonia from Spain, and the bad news for Catalonia separatists is that Podemos topped polls in the northeastern region in the Sunday election. Altogether, parties opposing a Catalan split from Spain won 30 seats. The separatists won 17 seats. Pro-independence parties in the Catalonia assembly have failed to agree on a joint regional government. This gives power to the fringe left-wing party CUP, which did not present candidates in Sunday's national election, and which rejects Catalan membership in NATO and the EU. CUP will soon decide if it will support the center-right so that the region can form a government. If not, fresh regional elections will have to be held by March. ~~~~~ Dear readers, the unprecedented fragmented vote in Sunday's Spanish general elections was similar to the situation in neighboring Portugal, where the incumbent conservatives won an October election, but a socialist government backed by far left parties was ultimately sworn in. The general elections in both Spain and Portugal are the latest examples of rising populist forces in Europe taking control of national government at the expense of mainstream center-right and center-left parties. Greece was the first to break the hold of traditional centrist governing parties for a move to the left. All three are in southern Europe -- examples of countries whose voters reject the unsucceasful German model of austerity to pull them into a northern-typevEU manufacturing-based economy. The opposite is happening in northern Europe, where conservative and far-right parties -- for example, the rise of the National Front in France and the British push to completely leave the EU -- reject the German migrant-immigration model because they fear not only jihadist terrorist infiltration but also the loss of their national cultural and Christian identities. The reasons are different but the forces for an EU collapse are gathering steam and challenging the right of the EU to override their national political, economic and cultural choices.