Spain's ruling Socialists have cut the opposition's lead in opinion polls by 3 percentage points with their candidate for the 2012 parliamentary election, according to an opinion poll published on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The state-owned Centre for Sociological Studies (CIS) said the opposition Popular Party (PP) would get 43.1 percent of votes compared to the 36 percent garnered by a socialist party under former deputy prime minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba. CIS gave the PP a ten point lead over the socialists in its previous poll in April, conducted just after Spain's increasingly unpopular prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced he would not stand for a third term. -- SPA
