ANALYSIS: Spanish Socialists choose security over novelty

By Sinikka Tarvainen Feb 4, 2012, 18:08 GMT

Madrid - Spain's main opposition Socialist Party on Saturday chose a leader representing experience and security, giving former interior minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba a narrow victory at a party congress in Seville.

The 60-year-old veteran had been challenged by former defence minister Carme Chacon, a woman 19 years his junior, who had promised a new era.

Rubalcaba will succeed Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who led the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) for more than a decade and governed Spain from 2004-11.

The new Socialist leader, whom his critics slammed as a man of the past, faces the difficult task of reviving the PSOE during one of the deepest crises in the party's 133-year history.

The Socialists are still licking their wounds after suffering massive electoral defeats to the opposition conservatives in regional polls in May and in parliamentary elections in November.

The success of the far-left party IU in the parliamentary elections, as well as the emergence in 2011 of a young people's protest movement critical of both of the big parties, reflect a disillusionment among many leftists with the PSOE, which they no longer see as a real left-wing alternative.

In social policy, Zapatero was situated clearly on the left, defying Spain's formerly powerful Catholic Church with daring reforms such as homosexual marriage, stem-cell research, and easier access to abortion and divorce.

He appointed Spain's first half-female cabinet, and created the first ministry to promote equality between men and women.

The Socialists now see many of those reforms as being in danger under Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's conservative government, which only includes four women and intends to return to the more restrictive 1985 abortion law.

Zapatero's Achilles' heel, however, was the economy as the global crisis plunged Spain into a deep recession.

The government underestimated the seriousness of the crisis, delaying austerity policies which it then had to adopt all of a sudden under European pressure.

The government's spending cuts and liberal reforms - such as labour reform that made it easier for companies to sack workers - undermined its left-wing credentials.

Rubalcaba has tried to distance himself from that part of Zapatero's legacy, criticizing a strategy based mainly on austerity in defeating the economic crisis.

However, many see Rubalcaba's traditional Social-Democratic orientation as having little new to offer.

It might not even be enough to ideologically challenge the PP government, which moved slightly to the left this week by announcing sharp cuts in the salaries of top bankers receiving state funds, observers said.

'There is no immediate way out of the crisis the PSOE is in,' columnist Javier Perez Rojo wrote in the daily El Pais.