MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's conservative opposition is on track for a decisive victory at parliamentary elections next month, a poll showed on Sunday, with government support worn down by years of austerity and voters unswayed by an end to Basque separatist violence.
The ruling Socialists' prime ministerial candidate Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba continues to trail the People's Party (PP) for a November 20 vote, even though he is widely credited with having brought separatist group ETA to its knees as Spain's interior minister.
The end of decades of ETA violence will not give Rubalcaba more votes, a majority of people said in a Metroscopia poll for centre-left newspaper El Pais.
A separate poll in the right-leaning El Mundo newspaper, taken before ETA's announcement on Thursday, showed the PP would receive 47.8 percent of the vote if the election were held tomorrow, while only 30.7 percent would vote for the Socialists.
Battling sky-high unemployment and a stagnant economy, voters want to punish Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero for tough reforms and austerity measures aimed at preventing Spain from getting sucked into the euro debt crisis that first emerged in Greece two years ago.
While the PP is expected to ramp up cost cutting, it has yet to produce a definitive manifesto of measures. But analysts say many voters are so keen to replace the Socialists that they will trust the PP's Mariano Rajoy without fully knowing what he plans.
The likely new PP government will also have to negotiate the details of ETA's settlement, including possibly the fate of its arms caches.
Though ETA has ended four decades of violence, its quest for an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain and southern France remains alive, and it has broken ceasefires in the past.
On Saturday, tens of thousands of Basque separatists rallied in Bilbao, the region's largest city, to demand political solutions for their independence movement and the return of ETA prisoners to jails in their region.
ETA, which has killed more than 800 people, has been weakened by hundreds of arrests and disenchantment with its violent means, but support for a leftist political coalition in the Basque region with ties to the organisation has been growing.
(Reporting by Tracy Rucinski; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)
