LEAD: Zapatero cheered and booed as Spaniards elect new parliament

Nov 20, 2011, 13:26 GMT

Madrid - Economically embattled Spain was voting Sunday in parliamentary elections expected to sweep the opposition conservatives to power, with political leaders calling for a high turnout.

'The future is in the hands of citizens,' outgoing Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said amid applause and booing from the public after casting his vote.

Zapatero, who has come under strong criticism over his handling of the country's economic crisis, is not seeking a third term in the elections pitting conservative leader Mariano Rajoy against Zapatero's former interior minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba.

Both Rubalcaba and Rajoy called for a high turnout in the elections. There has been concern over a low turnout among leftist voters.

Rubalcaba said Spain stood in a 'historic crossroads,' while Rajoy said a high turnout would send an important 'message to the world.'

Nearly 36 million people were eligible to vote in elections in which no significant incidents were reported.

Opinion polls have predicted a landslide victory for Rajoy's People's Party (PP) in the elections dominated by Spain's record unemployment rate of 21.5 per cent.

Spain has 1.4 million households with all their active members out of work. About 45 per cent of people under the age of 25 are unemployed.

Economic growth has also ground to a halt, and the government is not expected to be successful in its attempts to cut the budget deficit to 6 per cent this year from 9.2 per cent in 2010.

Spain's borrowing costs have meanwhile been affected by the debt crisis engulfing Greece and Italy, surging to a level where it appeared possible that the eurozone's fourth-largest economy might need an international bailout.

Rajoy has pledged to cut spending even more drastically than Zapatero has done.

The Socialists' losses may benefit smaller parties, such as the far-left Izquierda Unida, according to opinion polls.

In the Basque region, the elections were the first without the threat of separatist violence since the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.

A non-violent Basque separatist party, Amaiur, was expected to enter the Spanish parliament following an announcement by the armed separatist group ETA in October that it had ended its 43-year campaign of bombings and shootings.

Non-violent separatism has been on the rise simultaneously with the decline of ETA, whose violence claimed about 850 lives.

The elections were preceded by new demonstrations by a young people's protest movement known as the Indignant Ones, which criticizes the power of financial markets over politics.

Some members of the movement called on Spaniards to vote blank, while others urged voters to choose small parties to break the domination of the two main parties.