Is Spain heading for a snap election?

Spain could be heading for a fresh general election if the country’s embattled Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, loses a vote of no confidence on Friday.

What led to the crisis?

It will be the second no confidence vote in Rajoy in under a year, and follows a long-running corruption trial in which 29 people connected to Rajoy’s centre-right People’s Party were convicted of charges ranging from influence-peddling and falsifying accounts.

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The Socialist Party (PSOE) opposition which brought the confidence vote has proposed their leader Pedro Sanchez as interim replacement prime minister, but they “may struggle to garner enough support in the fragmented legislature to unseat Rajoy” says CNBC.

Despite numerous constitutional crises, including corruption charges against his own party and separatists unrest in Catalonia, Rajoy has so far remained defiant and vowed to see out the remainder of his four-year term, which ends in 2020.

Will the vote succeed?

Much now rests on the centrist Ciudadanos party, which is currently leading in the polls and carries the balance of power in Spain’s divided parliament.

Its leader, Albert Rivera, told The Guardian that the recent corruption convictions have fatally wounded the government and plunged the country into an “institutional crisis” that can be resolved only through a snap general election.

Yet despite the strong rhetoric, Ciudadanos have so far ruled out supporting the no-confidence vote. His party is implacably opposed to Catalan independence, and he said he and his fellow Ciudadanos MPs would never back a motion involving “populists and nationalists”.

As well as PSOE, the motion is being backed by the anti-austerity Podemos party “but is likely to struggle to attract majority support in parliament even if Basque and Catalan nationalist parties throw their weight behind it”, says the Guardian.

What does Ciudadanos want?

Rivera told COPE radio station that Ciudadanos would be open to proposing a second motion of no-confidence with an independent candidate as interim PM and an eye to calling an early election.

But El Pais says the party would rather have Rajoy himself call an early poll.

By contrast, the paper adds, Podemos wants Sanchez become the interim PM and form a “progressive government”.

What happens next?

The Local lists three possible scenarios from Friday’s vote. First, that division among opposition parties offer Rajoy hope of survival, albeit politically weakened. Second, that PSOE and Podemos form a unstable minority socialist government, and third, Ciudadanos forces a snap election.

“Even if no successful motion is passed to oust Rajoy, the risk of early elections before the end of the year has increased significantly,” Antonio Barroso, an analyst at Teneo Intelligence, told Reuters.

In the event of an election held before the end of the year, “a centrist, market-friendly and pro-European government would be the most likely result,” he added.