Spain 5 months without a government - New York Times

MADRID — Belgium famously sealed a dubious notoriety five years ago when it spent 589 days without an elected government. While Spain is not quite Belgium yet, it is getting there.
Spain has started its fifth month without a government, but it is very likely to spend six months or more in political limbo, many analysts now predict, as the Spaniards give the Flemings and Walloons a run for their money in the political discord category.
One word that seems to come up a lot these days when discussing politics is circo (or circus).
After an election in December produced no clear winner, scattering votes among the four main parties, those parties have failed to negotiate a governing coalition. As the politicians squabble incessantly, about the only consensus is that the country has entered uncharted waters.
Mariano Rajoy, the former prime minister, is clinging to his office as acting prime minister after turning down an offer from the king to form a government. His government ministers refuse to recognize the Parliament that resulted from the election or even deal with its lawmakers. The new Parliament has taken the government to court for not recognizing its legitimacy, while not recognizing the legitimacy of Mr. Rajoy, either.
That is where things stand.
It was not supposed to be this way. A new generation of party leaders had promised that the December vote would usher in a period of change and constitutional reform.
Instead, Spain is verging on constitutional crisis. The order of the day is institutional sclerosis, a lot of posturing and “generally a moment of great confusion,” said Rubén Amón, a columnist for El País, a Spanish newspaper.
“Politicians have given a very bad image in which all party leaders have put their own personal survival ahead of the general interest,” Mr. Amón said.
It is not as if public perceptions of the politicians could sink much lower in a country where virtually every party has been caught up in corruption scandals in recent years. But the nearly complete undermining of the public’s faith in its political institutions may be about the only thing achieved since the start of the year.
This month’s parliamentary debating was a case point. The session on April 6 was supposed to give lawmakers an opportunity to challenge Mr. Rajoy on why his government had backed a controversial European Union agreement to have Turkey take back unwanted refugees.
But humanitarian considerations quickly gave way to far more personal tensions between the leaders of Spain’s two emerging parties — Albert Rivera of Ciudadanos, or Citizens, and Pablo Iglesias of the far-left Podemos.
The two men, in their 30s, have presented themselves as a new generation of Spanish politician. But the new generation looked every bit like the old one, as they hurled accusations of cronyism.
It was part of what Luis María Anson, a veteran journalist, called “a depressing show” since the December election. Spanish politics, he argued in a recent column in the newspaper El Mundo, has become “a circus ring in which every day acrobatic leaders make ridiculous pirouettes to the stupefaction of citizens.”
Manuel de la Rocha Vázquez, an adviser to the Socialist party, suggested that the flamboyant sparring had become unavoidable in an era of round-the-clock news coverage.