Spain’s Rajoy on the Defensive as New Generation Seeks Power
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Mariano Rajoy is struggling to convince Spaniards he can lead the country into a new period of prosperity as a younger generation of politicians challenges his grip on power.
The 60-year-old prime minister has been eclipsed in recent surveys by Pablo Iglesias, 36, the leader of the newly created anti-austerity party Podemos, while the 42-year-old Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez says Rajoy is out-of-date. Even within the government, 43-year-old Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria’s approval rating was 11 percentage points higher than her bosses, in a Metroscopia poll for El Pais newspaper released last month.