Spain's Catalonia votes "yes" to more regional power

MADRID, June 19 (Reuters) Spain's Catalonia region voted overwhelmingly in favour of a statute giving it more autonomy yesterday, but low turnout in the ballot immediately sparked questions about its validity.

According to official data, with 98.5 percent of the votes counted, 73.9 percent of Catalans said ''yes'' to a fiercely contested statute that has fired debate on autonomy in Spain's regions and reawakened sensitivities that date back to the Civil War of the 1930s.

But just under half of the five million Catalans eligible to vote did so, with 50.6 percent abstaining from the ballot.

The leader of the right-leaning main opposition party Mariano Rajoy said the result showed a lack of support for the central government-backed project.

''This has been a demonstration of common sense ... Catalans have not supported (Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez) Zapatero's personal project, 2 out of 3 of them were not in favour,'' Rajoy said, counting those who abstained as equal to a ''no'' vote.

The referendum gives Spain's wealthiest region a greater slice of its income tax and more spending is considered a test of strength of the central government.

The statute has been the subject of bitter dispute between regional and national political parties for more than a year, centering on a phrase that says Catalonia perceives itself as ''a nation''.

Compromise on that phrase in the final statute was eventually rejected by both ends of the political spectrum -- the right-leaning Popular Party (PP), which says it is a threat to Spanish unity, and the Catalan nationalist party Esquerra Republicana (ERC), which says it does not go far enough.

Zapatero's government, seen as inclined to give more autonomy to Spain's already powerful regions, campaigned for a ''yes'' result.

But the PP has accused the prime minister of selling out in both Catalonia and in the Basque Country, where the government aims to start peace talks with ETA separatist guerrillas after they declared a ceasefire in March.

REUTERS PDS RAI0555