To answer reader Cliff Arroyo’s question, Spain tried once again to elect a government and once again was not fully successful. Conservatives got more votes than the first time around but not enough to just go ahead and form the flapping government already. The new left-wing party Podemos failed to keep its promise and become the most important leftist party of Spain. To the contrary, it managed to disappoint many of its original supporters by unending bickering over trivial issues.
For now, everybody’s hope is that yet another re-vote can be avoided because voting in the same election many times around is getting boring. This whole situation is a warning to those who believe that the two-party system here in the US sucks. Spaniards were bored with their two-party system*, too, so they introduced more parties to the mix and now haven’t been able to form a government since 2015.
*There are several smallish parties in Spain but they never offered any serious challenge to the two major players, Conservatives and Socialists. Until 2015, when serious challengers to the two-party model arose for the first time.
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