Spain Opposition Leader to Step Down after EU Bashing

Spain's opposition Socialist Party leader Alfredo Rubalcaba announced Monday he will step down after his party sustained heavy losses in the European parliamentary elections.

Rubalcaba's Socialists and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's ruling Popular Party each lost about a third of their European seats in a backlash by voters, who are angry over the economic crisis and corruption.

Rubalcaba said he had called an extraordinary Socialist Party congress for July 19-20 to elect new leadership of Spain's main opposition party, which was driven from power in 2011.

"I assume my responsibility for electoral results that were bad," Rubalcaba told a news conference after his party lost nine European Parliament seats in Sunday's vote.

The Socialists now hold just 14 out of Spain's total of 54 seats in the Strasbourg-based EU legislature.

Rubalcaba, who served as deputy prime minister under former premier Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, described the results as "very worrying" for his party.

"Later I will hand over power to another secretary general to be chosen by the congress," he said.

As in austerity-hit Greece, smaller insurgent parties that tapped into voter discontent with traditional politics were the main winners in Sunday's vote in Spain.

"Podemos", a new left-wing party born out of Spain's "Indignant" movement against economic inequality which occupied city squares three years ago and has been compared to Greece's radical left-wing Syriza party, won five seats.

Rubalcaba has failed to persuade voters that he is different from Zapatero, who stepped down in 2011 and who many accuse of not acting swiftly enough to fend off an economic crisis sparked by the collapse of a property boom that has left one in four people out of work.

In the early general election of November 2011 Rubalcaba led the Socialist Party to its worst result since Spain returned to democracy following the death of longtime dictator General Francisco Franco.

The party captured 29 percent of the vote in the election, which was won by Rajoy's Popular Party in a landslide.

Under his watch the Socialists have consistently trailed the Popular Party in opinion polls despite noisy street protests against government austerity measures and painful economic reforms such as a reform of the labor code that makes it easier to fire workers.

In Sunday's European Parliament elections backing for the Socialist Party was down to 23 percent.

The Socialists; top candidate in the election, Elena Valenciano, said the results were "hard, difficult".

"What is clear is that we have not regained citizens' trust, in part because lots of people are having a hard time, and they have been having a hard time for a while. In fact, they started having hard times when we were in government," said Rubalcaba.

"We have not regained their trust because people are having a hard time and there are people that remember that this started when we were in government," he added.

When the Socialists took power under Zapatero in 2004 Spain was riding a construction boom fueled by low interest rates and foreign demand for vacation homes along the country's extensive costline.

But when the international credit crisis hastened a correction that was already under way in the property sector in 2007, millions of people were thrown out of work and banks and homeowners became engulfed in debt.