Please pardon the thin diary entry. I didn't see anything about this on the list and there was no open thread. My wife is a Spanish scholar and has been monitoring El Pais (the NY Times of Spain) and reports that the Rightwing Partido Popular (led by the Neo-Francoist and Aznar protege Mariano Rajoy) is being crushed by the Socialist party led by Jose Luis Zapatero. The P.P.'s agenda has been a virtual clone of BushCo -- focus on terrorism, xenophobia, homophobia, "family values" B.S., the erasure of the separation of church and state, etc. They have blamed their loss in the last election on the '04 train bombings (which they had hastily and incorrectly tried to pin on Basque terrorists). But now they are being soundly repudiated in a nation where upwards of 75% of eligible voters turn out to vote.
BBC covers the story in English here.
NY Times covers it here.
Update:
Please see this post from downthread from "Virginian in Spain," which goes into far more detail than I am capable of:
I have been posting comments on the Open Threads. Right now, the socialists have 167 seats in Parlament, and the conservative Partido Popular has 155 with 87% of the votes counted. However, although the Socialists have clearly won, the PP has advanced 7 seats, whereas the Socialists have advanced only 3 seats. And the non-socialist left has virtually collapsed. The only parties that have been saved from this tremendous bipolarization are the moderate-to-conservative nationalist parties in the Canary Islands, the Basque Country, and Calatuña. Why is this important? It seems clear that the Socialists will need the 10 votes of Convergencia e Unió (moderate to conservative Catalan nationalists) to govern. This is bad, because Unió is a christian-democrat party, and is clearly conservative on religious and social matters (as is the main Basque nationalist party). So this puts a stop to progress on abortion, and other matters - although gay marriage is safe. Progressive economic reforms will also be more difficult. In this new Parlament, although the Socialists have won, the Catholic Church is clearly more powerful. So the news from Spain is mixed, I'm afraid.