Spain's Rajoy raises job creation forecast as election nears

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain will have created around 1 million jobs in two years by the end of 2015, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said in an interview published on Sunday, more than initially predicted by the government, which is banking on a growing economic recovery.

Efforts to combat Spain's sky high unemployment rate - at 23.7 percent, the second-highest in Europe after Greece - will be a cornerstone of political campaigning this year as a general election approaches.

The Spanish government had originally forecast about 800,000 more people would find work in 2014 and 2015. Rajoy maintained the economy would grow by 2 percent this year, as previously predicted, but said there would be 550,000 to 600,000 more people in work and paying in to social security in 2015.

Official data from December showed there were 417,574 more workers paying into the social security system than a year earlier.

"Therefore ... that's close to a million more (people paying into the social security system) in these two years," Rajoy said in an interview with news agency Efe, published by Spanish media on Sunday.

Spaniards are due to vote in a new government by year-end. Rajoy's centre-right People's Party (PP) had said it would end its term with an unemployment rate below 23 percent, the level it stood at when it came to power in late 2011.

But this rate soared to as much as 27 percent in an ensuing financial crisis and another year and a half of recession, and even now is only dropping slowly.

Although Spain has become one of the euro zone's fastest-growing economies this year, high unemployment has remained a major drag on the turnaround and has meant millions of families are yet to feel any relief.

There were 4.45 million people registered as out of work in December, according to data from the Labour Ministry, although a survey from the National Statistics Institute INE put the number of jobless at 5.4 million for the third quarter of 2014.

The latest INE job survey for the fourth quarter is due on Jan. 22.

(Reporting by Sarah White and Jesus Aguado; Editing by Rosalind Russell)