Latest polls continue to predict hung parliament in Spain

Polls published in Spanish newspaper on Sunday continued to predict that the June 26 general election will produce another hung parliament in the country, but with important changes in the results.

A poll produced by Metroscope for the El Pais newspaper showed that the right-wing People's Party (PP) of Mariano Rajoy will win the election, but with a predicted 28.5 percent of the vote, the PP would only see an improvement of 0.8 percentage points from its performance in December 2015 and fall well short of the 176 seats needed for an overall majority in the Spanish Congress.

A major change of the poll is that the left-wing coalition Unidos Podemos has climbed to the second place with 25.6 percent of the voting intentions, a sharp rise from the 23.3 percent they were predicted to have by Metroscope just a fortnight ago,

That rise in support came with the stagnation of the campaign by the Socialist Party (PSOE), whose support has dropped to 20.2 percent. Opinion has become increasingly polarized between the left and the right with the center ground slowly being squeezed.

It could be a significant change as following the last election, Rajoy said he was unable to form a government and King Felipe VI turned to the Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez to try to form a government.

Should Rajoy again be unable to reach an agreement with other parties, it would now be Podemos Unidos leader, Pablo Iglesias, who would almost certainly be given the chance to form a coalition government.

Meanwhile the center-right party Ciudadanos (Citizens), whose support has been highly volatile in recent weeks, has got 16.6 percent of the vote.

These findings are echoed in another poll published in the online El Espanol newspaper, which gives the PP 27.7 percent of the vote, Unidos Podemos 24.3, the PSOE 21.6 and Ciudadanos 15.4 percent, once again highlighting Unidos Podemos' rising popularity and a possible polarization of opinion. Endit