With 97 percent of the votes officially counted on Sunday, the conservative Popular Party (PP) had won the most seats in the 350-member parliament.
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The PP won 137 seats, improving on its victory in an inconclusive poll in December, with the Socialist Party recording its worst result in its history with 85 seats.
Unidos Podemos (United We Can) – which brings together Podemos, a two-year-old party that grew out of a grassroots protest movement, and communists and greens – came in third with 71 seats.
He turned down the King’s offer to form the new government, considering that he has no majority in the Congress of Deputies.
Complicating those negotiations, the poll indicated that a new radical leftist alliance called Unidos Podemos (United We Can) came second with 25.6 percent of the vote, winning between 91 and 95 seats.
Besides tension over Catalonia, Spanish political debate has been dominated by an unemployment rate that has stood at more than 20 percent for almost seven years and is the second highest in the European Union after Greece, and an unrelenting stream of corruption scandals, mostly involving the Popular Party and the Socialists.
Polls are prohibited in the last week of campaigning, but the most recent ones suggested the conservative Popular Party would win most votes but would again fall short of the parliamentary majority it had from 2011 to 2015.
“We won and we demand the right to govern”, Rajoy said as he looked down from a tall podium on a crowd of supporters waving blue flags and shouting “yes we can!” – stealing Podemos’ key catchphrase.
That would likely consign Spain to another period of protracted political negotiations – and, possibly, another election if there is no breakthrough.
But while the PP boosted it’s seats, it still faces that same challenges to form a government as after the December polls when Podemos and Ciudadanos uprooted the country’s two-party dominance.
“The PP is the only party that guarantees us stability and economic growth”, said Andres Alvarez, a 23-year-old advertising executive, as he celebrated outside the party’s Madrid headquarters. Exit polls with projections of the result are expected within minutes of polls closing, and most votes are expected to be counted by 11 p.m. (2100 GMT). Its political parties were unable to form a coalition after the December ballot, forcing another ballot for Spain’s roughly 36.5 million voters.
Silvia Gea, a 39-year-old pharmacist from Madrid and long-time PP voter who cast her ballot for Ciudadanos in December, said she backed the PP this time around because she hoped it would help unlock the six-month stalemate.
“I’m voting for change, so that our politicians understand that we don’t agree with what they’ve been doing”, said Maria Jesus Genovar, a 47-year-old teacher who supported Unidos Podemos.
Yet, she said she doubted political parties would reach an agreement any time soon.
The PP with its higher number of seats will be in a position of force, though it will still need to seek the outright or tacit support of other parties to get a coalition or minority government through, as it does not have a majority.
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Ciudadanos is willing to talk to both the Popular Party and the Socialists but want no deal with Unidos Podemos.
