Spanish right celebrates landslide election win

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Spain's right stormed to its biggest election win ever on Sunday, unleashing dancing in the street by voters desperate for an end to soaring unemployment and a eurozone debt storm.

Mariano Rajoy, the bearded 56-year-old leader of the conservative Popular Party, literally jumped for joy as he proclaimed victory.

"Forty-six million Spaniards are going to wage a battle against the crisis," he told a sea of cheering supporters from a balcony outside his party headquarters in Madrid, where cars blared their horns in the streets.

Voters handed the ruling Socialists their biggest defeat in history, chasing them from seven years in office in which an economic boom went bust and the unemployment rate shot to 21.5 percent.

"The Socialist Party did not have a good result. We clearly lost the elections," the party's candidate for premier, 60-year-old Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba told his party faithful.

Spain's government was the last to fall among the eurozone's so-called periphery nations this year, after Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Italy all succumbed to a collapse of confidence in their sovereign debt.

With more than 97 percent of the ballots counted, Rajoy's Popular Party had 44.57 percent of the vote and an absolute majority of 186 seats in the 350-member Congress of Deputies.

The win gives Rajoy a free hand to ram through severe austerity measures in the eurozone's fourth biggest economy.

The Socialists won 28.67 percent of the vote, giving them 110 seats, the partial count showed.

"Spain needed a change. We have had eight years of a failed government," said 16-year-old high school student Jorge Alises who carried a Partido Popular flag as well as a red and yellow Spanish one.

"I have a lot of faith in Rajoy's team. They are very focused on Spain's main problem, which is the economy."

Though considered uncharismatic, Rajoy won support from voters lured by his promise to fix the economy and create jobs, even if it means more austerity.

He has vowed to make cuts "everywhere", except for pensions, so as to meet Spain's target of cutting the public deficit to 4.4 percent of gross domestic product in 2012 from 9.3 percent last year.

"This will be a strong change for the whole of Spain," said one celebrating Popular Party supporter, Alicia Borderia, 46, who is unemployed. "He will take measures to get us out of the crisis and unite us."

Analysts say Rajoy, who will be sworn in from December 20, must quickly impose reforms to reassure world markets.