SO THE RESULTS are in and Zapatero won yesterday's election with 163 seats v PP's 153. It's a clear victory, but I disagree with so many who say it's such a clear endorsement of his policies during the last 4 years since he unexpectedly won after the Madrid terrorist massacre.

First of all, with an almost identical turnout than in 2004, the Socialist Party did win more seats in the Congress of Deputies -the lower chamber- but with essentially the same number of votes, around 11 million. Meanwhile, the conservative Popular Party got 10.2 million votes versus 9.8 in 2004. When Aznar won in 1996, he had 156 seats in parliament, only 3 more than this time. So you could argue that the conservative PP lost by winning, if you get my drift. He did better than last time, but not well enough. Meanwhile, the Socialists won by staying pretty much were they were. It's a sweet-and-sour victory of sorts

What we're seeing is that the political scene has polarized and that the 2 major parties are getting most of the vote, with smaller and regional parties getting a substantial minor chunk of the pie. It was a tendency which started in earlier contests, but now it's clear that Spain is becoming a two-party system.

So, how come the Socialist Party got more seats if it got essentially the same number of votes, you may be asking yourselves. The answer is easy: let me introduce you to Mr. D'Hondt. The way Spain allocates seats, big parties are benefited: they get proportionally more seats than they would in a pure proportional system. So the number of seats depend as much on how many votes big parties get as on how many the smaller parties get. That is, in a pure proportional system, if three parties get, say 100 votes each, and considering for the sake of the argument that you need 100 votes to get a seat, they would all get one seat. But if one party gets 200 votes and the other two 75 and 25 votes each, the winning party doesn't get 2 seats and the second one the third, but it gets all three. Got it?

And the fact is that in this election many small parties, who had a remarkable representation in the Congress of Deputies -at least enough to make a dent-, this time simply crashed and burned. They were small parties that the Socialist party had been allied with during this four years. When Zapatero won in 2004, he didn't have a clear majority, and had made clear that he was going to advance his reform agenda no matter what the main opposition party thought. It was an arrangement that worked well for both sides: Zapatero needed those small parties to get enough votes to pass those reforms, and those small parties enjoyed an amount of influence they would have never dreamt of. They were either the Communist party (IU) or Catalan pro-independence parties (ERC), who in turn demanded concessions in exchange for his support, which translated in a clear left turn of the Socialist party. They even signed an agreement to establish a cordon sanitarie isolating the Popular Party: they pledged not to enter into any kind of agreement whatsoever with the conservatives (yeah, you read that right).

Little did those guys imagine they were sitting in a couch with an 800-pound gorilla who would crush them into tiny bits. Which is exactly what happened yesterday: either their voters thought their ballot would be more effective if it was cast to the bigger one (Mr. D'Hondt again; why voting a small guy if you get the same agenda implemented by Mr Big, with more chances to win?), or either they stayed home disappointed. After all, their bases were not entirely comfortable with their leaders' decisions to support the Socialist party: for the communists, it isn't leftist enough; for the Catalan pro-independentists, Socialist parties -with their their internationalistic foundations- are not exactly nationalistic nirvana.

But Zapatero's victory is far from sweeping for another reason. While the Socialist Party won the Congress of Deputies yesterday, the conservative Popular Party won the Senate. True, in Spain the higher chamber is not like in the US or other countries, where it introduces legislation: it merely has a second look to what the Congress has passed. It can modify that legislation and even strike it down, but in either of those cases the bill is sent back to Congress, who can accept or reject the Senate's decision. So it means the real legislative power lays in the lower chamber, but, still, it can get complicated if the Popular Party decides to filibuster every single piece of legislation.

So in the next four years, Zapatero's choice will be to re-build the bridges with the Popular Party he so badly burned since 2004, bringing some calm to the political climate, which is badly needed. Or he can reach agreement with the moderate Catalan party CiU, which is not pro-independence and is quite pro-business, pro-Western: they got 11 seats, enough for the Socialist Party to get the absolute majority (176 seats). Or he can go on like he did in the last 4 years, since, since there's not really an alternative: even if the PP would convince CiU to coalesce against Zapatero, they still wouldn't have enough seats for a recall.

My hunch is that the latest scenario is the most likely: after all, Zapatero knows that if he moves towards the center, the Communists and the Catalan independentists will revive, and any vote fragmentation will be costly.

UPDATE. Soeren Kern is gloomy.