About 11-M (1)

I don't usually comment on the news in this blog, but I'll publish a couple of good articles from Puerta del Sol blog, a really good blog with "Reflections on life in Spain and Spanish culture". And it's written in good English!

"On the one hand, the victors: the PSOE, led by new PM José Luis Zapatero (elected last 14 March), stressing, in an interview with Iñaki Gabilondo this morning, that Spain has voted for change and for peace, that young people have realized that their vote can make a difference, that he is prepared to take Spanish soldiers out of Iraq if necessary - this is where the international repercussions of the PSOE's defeat will be most strongly-felt - and that his mandate is going to be about dialogue, openness and democracy. On the other hand, the defeated Partido Popular, who must be in a state of shock and whose more hardline supporters suggest that this is a victory for Al Qaeda (or, if not AQ, then terrorism), that the PSOE's electoral victory shows terrorists that bombs can unseat a democratically-elected government. This may turn out to have been a defeat for José María Aznar which translated into a defeat for his party, not all of whose members were in favour of Spain's unqualified support for the U.S.

But it should be remembered that the PSOE's victory, though catalyzed by last Thursday's bombings, has also come as the result of many people's concern with the manner in which the PP has handled several recent political hot potatoes, particularly the Prestige oil spill, and its high-handedness with regard to its manipulation of the media, not least the state TV channel. (Apparently messages were sent to Spanish embassies following the bombing, telling them to report the bombings as the work of ETA rather than of Al Qaeda: the revelation of that particular fact was a further blow to the PP's electoral prospects.) Internal concerns, if you will. A month ago, Zapatero was not doing too badly in the polls, and though he never really looked like winning, to suggest that his election is purely the result of what happened last Thursday would not be correct for many of the Spaniards who voted for him yesterday. The PP actually lost less than a million votes: the PSOE has been partly elected on votes lost by the left-wing Izquierda Unida coalition, and partly on votes by people who did not vote last time around.

The reading that this election result has given a green light to terrorism generates the fear that it will encourage further pre-election attacks in other countries. Sadly, this will probably be the case - and it would probably also have been the case had the PP won yesterday's election. But I've seen it written in blogs that the Spanish electorate, therefore, are in some sense responsible for future deaths at the hands of terrorists (this is not something that would ever be said in Spain, and the people who say it are forgetting the support that the US has received from Spain's governing party thus far). This kind of reasoning gets us nowhere. Surely very few of the people who voted yesterday are pro-Al Qaeda, pro-ETA, pro-whatever. Quite the opposite. This, coming days after the worst massacre on Spanish soil since the Civil War, was presumably a vote against both war and terrorism, and against the circumstances in which war and terrorism flourish. It was a vote which said "something here's not right: let's use our democratic system to see whether a change wouldn't be better". It seems to me that, albeit in very particular circumstances, democracy has been exercised, pure and simple."