From A to Z

Mr Aznar suffered a Shakespearean ending. Mr Zapatero has made a more quixotic start

SELDOM has hagiography turned so swiftly to reproach. Well before March 14th, the date that Mr Aznar himself had chosen for his departure from Spanish politics, the encomiums were pouring forth. Not only had he given Spain eight years of economic growth (an average of 3.2% a year), sound management of the public purse (no budget deficits like those of France, Germany and Italy), lowish inflation (2.6% in 2003) and a cut in the unemployment rate from 22% to 11%, but he had also had the resolve to beat back ETA (about 200 arrests in 2003, including those in France, and only three killings) and take Spain into the front line of Mr Bush's war against terror in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The voters did not care for all of it: 90% of Spaniards, in poll after poll, said they opposed the war in Iraq and Spain's part in it. But, since most of them also told the pollsters that they would vote for Mr Aznar's party under his chosen successor, Mariano Rajoy, they seemed to be implicitly acknowledging that they admired his leadership, and perhaps also his readiness to take them even where they did not want to go. That, however, proved to be a grave misreading of the voters' views.

In what is still a fairly conservative country, it is striking how few people now have good things to say about Mr Aznar. Forgotten, largely, are the achievements of his first term, when he presided over the continued devolution of power to the regions - admittedly driven by his government's dependence on regional parties in parliament. Forgotten, too, or taken for granted, are the decency and effectiveness with which he mostly governed (notably, again, in his first term), and which were in marked contrast to the sleaze at the end of the Socialists' previous period of office.

Not least among his achievements was to turn the People's Party (PP), often seen as Francoist in its sympathies, into a respectable centre-right organisation. All this is eclipsed, if only temporarily. Instead, the failings of the second Aznar term are now remembered, most of which come under the headings of rigidity and arrogance.

Top of the list, of course, is the attempted manipulation of public opinion in the period between the bombs of March 11th and the election of March 14th - the attempt to place the blame on ETA, the telephone calls to the media assuring them of ETA's guilt, the foreign minister's request for a specific condemnation of ETA in a UN resolution of sympathy, the state television's decision to drop an evening showing of “Shakespeare in Love” and run instead a documentary on the evils of ETA, and so on. This attempt at superspin - largely exposed by text-messaging on mobile phones - so infuriated a large group of Spaniards, most of them young, many of them too disillusioned with party politics to want to cast their ballots at all, that they went out and voted Socialist in disgust.

Mr Aznar is to this day uncontrite, conceding only that “perhaps Spanish public opinion was not sufficiently aware, until March 11th, of the extent of Islamic terrorism”. He telephoned Mr Bush to express his regret about his successor's decision to withdraw Spain's troops from Iraq. Some in his party believe the election was stolen from them. Most others put the episode down to simple hubris.

Mr Aznar's arrogance certainly had costs beyond his party's loss of the election in March. Coupled with his inflexibility, it needlessly antagonised all sorts of people who might have worked with him. The general hostility to Spain's Iraqi venture would surely have been less intense had the prime minister been ready to explain his reasons for it to the electorate.

As it was, he would not even go before parliament at the outset and make his case for sending troops to Iraq. Instead he merely asserted that it was good for Spain, and then grudgingly allowed a secret parliamentary vote, in which the entire PP was evidently whipped into line. It was only last December, eight months after the war began, that Mr Aznar addressed parliament about Iraq, on a day of mourning for seven intelligence officers just killed.

The alienation from Spain's partners in Europe could also have been tempered by a more diplomatic approach. Mr Aznar was right in seeing that Spain had an interest in good relations with both North and South America, but these could have been achieved without antagonising two of its neighbours, France and Morocco, and a potentially useful friend like Germany.

His decision last December to oppose, with Poland, any change to the majority-voting provision of the European Union's Nice treaty was even less defensible: the treaty, stitched up in haste in December 2000, gave Spain and Poland almost the same number of votes as much more populous Britain, France, Germany and Italy, and the system clearly needed to be changed if the enlarged EU were not to be immobilised for ever. The refusal of the Spanish and Polish governments to compromise led to an impasse over the proposed EU constitution, which was therefore in limbo when the Union took in ten new members on May 1st.

A similar obtuseness latterly marked Mr Aznar's relations with most of Spain's nationalists. Perhaps influenced by his dislike of ETA - which very nearly killed him, in a bomb attack in 1995 - he outlawed Batasuna, ETA's political wing, in 2002, depriving the state of a possible interlocutor with the terrorists. He also became less and less tolerant of other nationalists. Indeed, he grew increasingly prone to bracketing together all Basque nationalists, whether pro-violence or anti-violence, and refused to talk to the Basque premier, Juan José Ibarretxe, from 2001 on, even though Mr Ibarretxe's non-violent party had shown itself in successive elections to be the Basque region's most popular.

Many Basque nationalists are rather conservative - natural allies, it might be thought, of Mr Aznar's PP. Catalonia's nationalists in the Convergence and Union (CiU) party are even more natural partners, and indeed kept Mr Aznar's party in office during his first term. But once that necessity disappeared, so did any affection between the two. Mr Aznar increasingly seemed to regard all nationalist demands as equally outrageous, no matter who made them, and not surprisingly his party was fiercely punished in Catalonia's regional election last November. The CiU, equally unsurprisingly, is now grouped in the European Parliament with the other mainstream nationalists.

The Spanish electorate might well have forgiven the PP for some of the shortcomings of its outgoing leader, such as his handling of the wreck of the Prestige, a tanker that polluted a long stretch of the Atlantic coast in 2002, or the misjudgments that led to a general strike that same year. Strangely, Mr Aznar's more trivial foibles seem to have caused greater annoyance: his delight in putting his feet up on a table and smoking a cigar with Mr Bush at a G8 summit in Canada, for instance; even such folies de grandeur as holding a flamboyant wedding for his daughter in the Escorial monastery, near Madrid, where Spain's monarchs are traditionally buried.

Yet these too could all have been overlooked. His economic record, his success in weakening ETA and his impending departure could have been enough to ensure a victory for the PP under Mr Rajoy. But in the event he was undone by his response to the bombings, and so was his party.

The voters' revenge

Mr Zapatero's Socialists have been the main beneficiaries. The “certain” losers of the March election suddenly found themselves victors, and the poll for the European Parliament on June 13th suggests that their popularity has not diminished since. This in itself is evidence that the vote was not a passing reaction to the Madrid bombings that killed 191 people and injured 1,430. Still less was it a capitulation to terrorism, or any sort of attempt to appease Muslim attackers. Spain has lived with terror for over 30 years, during which more than 800 people have been killed by ETA. Throughout this time the Spaniards have shown no inclination to yield.

On the contrary, they have taken to the streets in throngs to express their disgust with the perpetrators of terror and their sympathy for the victims - notably on March 12th, when 11m people, over a quarter of the population, joined dignified demonstrations in cities across Spain. As William Chislett, of the Elcano Royal Institute, has pointed out, had ETA taken responsibility for the bombings, the PP would certainly have been returned with another absolute majority. As it was, the incoming Socialists quickly rededicated themselves to fighting terrorism, an aim to which they were already pledged in a formal anti-terrorist pact signed with the PP in 2000.

The Socialists came to office as surprised as everyone else that they were there (though Mr Zapatero protests otherwise), and utterly unprepared. Worse, they were encumbered with an election manifesto written in the belief that it would not have to be implemented and so promising a host of reforms that no prudent finance minister would want to pay for. Even so, the voters would surely have forgiven them if they had then explained that unforeseen circumstances made it impossible for them to do all that they had vowed.

So why was Mr Zapatero's first act to say that he would pull Spain's 1,300 troops out of Iraq? This, if anything, was an election commitment that could have been reconsidered in the light of the bloodiest terrorist attack in Europe since Lockerbie in 1988. And the case for reconsideration was strong. Though the withdrawal was genuinely an acknowledgment of the desires of a great majority of Spaniards, it was capable of being construed as a victory for terrorism. Mr Zapatero had himself once said that Spain's alignment with America had put it on the target list for international terrorists. So might this decision not have been seen as an attempt to get off that list?

Appeasement was certainly how many Americans would see it - Donald Rumsfeld is said to have also called it an act of cowardice - and possibly how al-Qaeda and its sympathisers would too. The withdrawal could at least have been postponed, but instead it was accelerated as Mr Zapatero quickly abandoned his initial condition: that it would happen only if the UN had not taken control of Iraq by June 30th. Instead, the new prime minister thumbed his nose at America and appeared to concede to terror as needlessly, it might be said, as Mr Aznar had so often needlessly annoyed those he disliked.

It could equally be said, in Mr Zapatero's defence, that he had not intended to withdraw Spain's troops so precipitately until it became clear, first, that no UN handover was in prospect and, next, that the troops were being asked not to help in stabilisation and reconstruction, as understood in the original mandate, but to take part in “an offensive strategy” against Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf. Mr Zapatero was always at pains to point out that Spain had 3,000 peacekeeping troops elsewhere, and was ready to strengthen its force in Afghanistan. And he has recently been much more restrained about Mr Bush's policies.

Keeping a promise

No doubt Mr Zapatero also wanted to avoid the experience of one of his predecessors, Mr González, who was re-elected in 1986 vowing to take Spain out of NATO but soon reversed himself and ended up, after a referendum, cementing its membership. Yet perhaps the most decisive consideration throughout for Mr Zapatero was the cries of “Don't fail us!” rising from the crowds of young voters in Madrid after the election. The promise to bring the troops home had been made by the Socialists over and over again for a year. Mr Zapatero evidently minded more about his bond with the voters, especially the 2m voting for the first time, than about anything else.

That, however, hardly explains the other surprise of Mr Zapatero's first post-election utterances: his readiness to make concessions over Spain's EU voting rights. The Socialists had always accepted the double-majority system that the PP jibbed at, and their pro-EU sympathies were well known. But to promise concessions without getting anything in return - nothing of consequence was, in the event, forthcoming - looked like foolishness or, to be charitable, inexperience.

Perhaps it was. Mr Zapatero has some old hands in his government, including the canny Pedro Solbes as economy minister, not even a member of the Socialist Party and just the man to reassure the financial markets. But the 43-year-old prime minister himself, whose youthful appearance has earned him the nicknames of Bambi and Babyface, is a novice. He will just have to learn on the job. It should not prove impossible for a man who was chosen as leader of his party chiefly because he was a moderniser, and who, by even his opponents' accounts, fought an effective election campaign.

From Mr Aznar to Mr Zapatero, this article looks at the transition in Spanish politics in 2004, looking at the legacy of the former and the prospects for the latter. Article forms part of a survey of Spain in this issue of The Economist.