Spain’s registered unemployment advanced for a second month in February, deepening the divide between peripheral economies struggling to recover from the financial crisis and Germany’s booming labor market.
The number of people registering for jobless benefits in Spain rose by 68,260, or 1.6 percent, from January to 4.3 million, the Labor Ministry in Madrid said in an e-mailed statement today.
Spain’s unemployment rate remains at more than 20 percent, while the number of Germans out of work dropped to the least since 1992 last month.
Spain’s economy emerged from an almost two-year recession in 2010 before contracting again in the third quarter as austerity measures undermined the recovery.
“Unemployment will remain fairly stubbornly high,” Giada Giani, an economist at Citigroup Inc., said before the data were released. “It probably isn’t too far away from the peak, but it’s unlikely to come down any time soon.”
The highest unemployment rate in Europe and the deepest budget cuts in at least three decades have eroded support for Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who faces regional and local elections in May.
The opposition People’s Party would win 44.1 percent of the vote if a general election were held now, compared with 34 percent for the ruling Socialists, a poll by the state-run Center for Sociological Research showed on Feb. 8.
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