SPAIN:Exit polls showed Spain's ruling socialists and the conservative opposition held most of their strongholds in yesterday's regional elections after campaigns dominated by debate over the future of the Basque Country.
The exit poll for state television found the status quo maintained in 15 of 17 regions, although turnout, at just over 50 per cent, was lower than the last regional elections in 2003.
The conservative Popular Party (PP) faced losing control of governments in Navarre and the Balearic Islands.
The ballots test the waters before a general election next year and the PP has attacked the prime minister, José Luís Rodriguez Zapatero, for being soft on Basque rebels Eta, with whom he tried but failed to negotiate a peace deal.
As predicted, the socialists took a battering in the capital, Madrid. PP mayor Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon widened his lead by up to three seats compared with the last election, a poll showed, following a lacklustre campaign by a little-known socialist candidate.
Polls showed socialists holding Seville and Barcelona, while the PP will stay in Valencia's town hall as well as Madrid's.
Election day passed peacefully, with the exception of some minor incidents in a couple of Basque towns when members of Eta's political front, the illegal Batasuna, demonstrated in protest at their prohibition, or when their leader, Arnaldo Otegi, tried to use his Basque identity card to vote. He refused to show a Spanish ID card and was obliged to show his driving licence.
Early in the day the mayor of the Basque resort city of San Sebastiaán was heckled as he cast his vote and in another polling station protesters scuffled with police, with one arrested.Batasuna called on its followers to vote for little-known separatist party ANV.
Thirty-five million Spaniards went to the polls. Almost 350,000 EU citizens resident in Spain had a vote in the 8,000 municipalities to elect new mayors and councillors, but they were unable to have their say in the elections for the regional governments.
This was the first real test for the Socialist Party, which narrowly won the general elections in 2004, just three days after Islamic terrorists detonated their bombs on commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people and injuring more than 2,000.
The PP has never accepted its defeat, accusing the socialists of using dirty tricks to influence the vote in the traumatic hours after the massacre.
Since then it has waged a bitter war of words against the government, breaking established practice to use the terrorism issue as an electoral weapon.
Alleged corruption in town planning and runaway development, much of it illegal, was also an election issue. In a dozen tourist resorts, foreign residents joined independent candidates on anti-corruption tickets.
Perhaps the most notorious is the Costa del Sol jet-set resort of Marbella, where more than 100 people - including the mayor, a former mayor, the deputy mayor, a chief of police and other leading dignitaries who amassed enormous fortunes in a short time - were arrested on charges of corruption and money laundering.