UPDATE (11/21):
Spain's election Sunday gave Spanish conservatives their biggest election victory in the country's post-Franco democracy. The center-right Popular Party, led by incoming prime minister Mariano Rajoy, 56, will have an absolute majority in the lower house allowing it to pass laws without the support of other parties. Rajoy campaigned on a pledge of tough austerity measures that he now promises to carry out -- in effect, rallying to the main thrust of the economic reform program that his party publicly rejected while it was in opposition.