Still, Spanish officials recently said they did not expect the jobless rate to fall below 15 percent until 2019. And there’s the matter of the country’s youth unemployment (those under 25): an almost incomprehensible 45.5 percent.

A new government in Spain — once it is chosen after almost half a year of discord — may end up pursuing smarter and bolder policies that reduce joblessness to levels that exist elsewhere in Europe.

But the chances of that look slim.

Spain’s unemployment is so high partly because of particular local forces that have existed for decades. Marcel Jansen, an expert on labor markets at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, notes that unemployment above 20 percent is not uncommon in Spain. In fact, it has been at that level in three periods since Spain’s transition to democracy in the 1970s. And, ominously, from the previous unemployment rate peak in the 1990s, it took 14 years for it to decline to the wider European level, Mr. Jansen notes.

One cause of the high rate became embedded in Spain’s labor market over the last 40 years. A significant proportion of Spain’s workers emerged from the dictatorship years with ironclad job security. Many of those protections remained, Mr. Jansen said, but much of the new hiring in the democratic era took place through temporary employment contracts. Just before the 2008 financial crisis, around a third of Spain’s workers were on temporary contracts, far higher than the European average.