LAST Sunday’s elections in the Galicia and Basque regions provided a welcome boost to the Partido Popular, presently governing Spain on a care-taker basis, and inflicted a blow to their main opposition, the socialist PSOE party. In both regions, the socialists lost seats to the anti-austerity party Podemos, but it was a bad result for the centrist Ciudadanos party, whose candidates polled under four per cent of the total votes in both regions.