NEWS ANALYSIS : Now Comes Hard Part for Spain’s Triumphant ‘Felipe’ : Elections: Socialist leader’s fourth victory comes amid economic and political crises. His majority is gone.

The old magic worked again. The man all Spain calls “Felipe” has a new lease on power. But now comes the hard part for fireproof Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez as he prepares to launch an improbable fourth term.

As the dust settled Monday from his toughest reelection campaign, the 51-year-old Socialist remained the commanding political figure in Spain despite economic and political crises that threatened to engulf him.

Senor Asbestos. After a bruising 11 years in office, the power and projection of Gonzalez’s persona carried his divided and tarnished party back into office, but with a vanished parliamentary majority and an intimidating agenda of national priorities to address.

In the electoral aftermath, 3.3 million Spaniards are still out of work, and allegations of political corruption against prominent Socialists still await investigation. The sense of national purpose that carried Spain so powerfully toward political and economic integration with Europe in a thrilling, breakneck decade seems spent.

Gonzalez IV will be different from its predecessors because a prime minister often called arrogant and aloof will be forced to adjust his style of government to reduced parliamentary support.

Lacking a majority, Gonzalez could seek a coalition government with the party led by pragmatic Catalan regional President Jordi Pujol. More likely, Spanish analysts said Monday, he will govern alone, seeking common cause with the Catalans--and perhaps others on the left--on individual issues.

“Gonzalez should demonstrate that he understands the popular mandate (is) that he govern differently,” said the Madrid daily El Pais.

That will mean a quick, albeit painful, attack against corrupt members of his own party, as well as new measures to combat the economic crisis, which has already forced three devaluations of the peseta and will mean a drop of around 1% in Spain’s gross national product this year.

Spain is a vastly different country than it was in the 1970s, but Gonzalez’s grip on the Spanish public fancy has hardly faltered since he burst then onto the public stage as a magnetic young opposition leader.

“Gonzalez’s triumph shows that the majority gives greater weight to strong personal leadership than to the dwindling prestige of his party,” groused the conservative newspaper ABC in defeat.

Every newspaper in Spain had Gonzalez’s political obituary ready to run when the polls opened Sunday. Spain is wallowing in a deep recession. A number of Gonzalez’s Socialists have been caught--belatedly--with their hands in the public till. In power for more than a decade, Gonzalez seemed at times uninterested in his job. He didn’t rule so much as reign, critics snapped.

Pre-election polls forecast a dead heat between Gonzalez and conservative challenger Jose Maria Aznar, forcing a coalition after 11 years of outright Socialist rule.

It didn’t happen. Aznar, a 40-year-old comer, did extremely well. “Felipe” did better.

Final complete returns Monday gave Gonzalez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party 38.6% of the vote and 159 seats in the 350-seat Parliament. Thanks to a larger electorate, that amounted to nearly a million votes more than in 1989, when the Socialists got 39.8% and 175 seats, enough for their third consecutive effective majority.

Aznar’s center-right Popular Party ran a strong second with 34.8% and 141 seats. In 1989, the conservatives won 25.9% and 107 seats. In narrowing the Socialists’ lead from 14 percentage points to four, Aznar won nearly 3 million new Spaniards to his party’s lists.

There were no surprises among also-rans. A United Left dominated by unreconstructed Communists won 9.5% and 18 seats, compared to 17 seats in 1989. Pujol’s Catalan regional party won 4.9% and 17 seats, compared to 18 the last time, and a Basque nationalist party got the same 1.2% and five seats that it won in 1989.

In erasing Gonzalez’s majority and reducing his plurality from 68 to 18 seats, Aznar’s conservatives ran well in north and central Spain, capturing Madrid and other large cities. The Socialists swept the Spanish south: They won a 17-seat advantage over the conservatives in Gonzalez’s native Andalusia--one less than their national margin in the new Parliament.

If the ambitious young Aznar fell short this time around, he gained by demonstrating that the center-right is capable of presenting a strong opposition with the implicit ability to govern.

“I think the voters were not saying ‘No’ to Aznar, but ‘Not yet,’ said Julian Santamaria, a political scientist at Complutense University and a former ambassador to the United States.