‘Something very odd has happened,” my Madrid taxi driver said. “You’re not supposed to admit that terrorists decided the election result, but what other conclusion can you draw? If the attack had been by Eta, the Popular party would have won by a landslide. It looks like it was Al-Qaeda so the Socialists win. Either way, the terrorists call the shots.”
I sense embarrassment in Spain today. The day after the bombs, the sight of millions of Spaniards marching through the streets was an inspiring act of steadfast defiance against terrorism. Denis MacShane, a British minister, contrasted the solidarity evidenced in Spain with the continued nitpicking in Britain about the origins of the war against Saddam Hussein.
However, 48 hours later the election result suggested that the Spanish might after all have been intimidated by the bombers and had voted to opt out of world affairs. Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Socialist leader, pledged to pull his troops out of Iraq, demonstrating that he at least was still preoccupied with the origins of a war that he said was founded on lies.
People in Spain reject the idea that their election was a victory for terrorists. Instead they hotly dispute what happened between Friday and Sunday, looking for a more palatable explanation for their national change of mind. By polling day it seemed to many Spanish voters that the Aznar government had been caught out blaming Eta to gain electoral advantage or to stave off defeat.
A cousin of mine, a Popular party (PP) supporter, thinks Jose Maria Aznar got that horribly wrong and that it cost him heavily. There are accusations that Television Española was leant on not to cover the demonstration on Saturday night (different from that on Friday) when an angry crowd outside the Popular party headquarters called the nation’s leaders cowards, liars and murderers.
Last week I wrote about my uncle Victor in Madrid. This week I saw him over a coffee in Atocha station. He fought for Franco and spent his career in the army, so discount his views if you wish. Nonetheless he believes the Socialists engaged in a disgraceful campaign to smear the government that Saturday night. He scoffs at the idea that the demonstration was spontaneous. It was organised, he says, in clear breach of the period of national mourning when campaigning was supposedly suspended.
The accusations from both sides are unpleasant. Perhaps there is already nostalgia for that earlier moment when there was unity in grief. My taxi driver had never seen anything like the sadness that descended after the bombing. People wept in the street. Outside Atocha they are weeping still. Makeshift shrines have sprung up. They have become familiar in the wake of tragedy but even if such tributes — flowers, messages, candles burning inside red glass — are a reflex action to national bereavement, they still retain the power to move. More precisely what touches me is the crowd gathered there. There are no histrionics, indeed nobody speaks above a whisper. As I move from bouquet to bouquet reading the dedications, I become aware that those alongside me are silently heaving with sobs.
Every atrocity represents a loss of innocence. In Spain there are two elements. First, this terror is new because it is unlimited. It is not what Spaniards have been used to during the sustained attack by Eta against their state. When the bombs exploded at Atocha, many people — not just the PP government — believed that Eta must be responsible, but if so they thought the Basque terrorists must have botched the operation. Normally there would have been a warning. Something must have gone wrong.
Now Spain is adjusting to the idea that the perpetrators of 11-M (as the headline writers there call Spain’s 9/11) simply wanted to kill as many people as possible.
Second, Spanish people have worked out that being a player on the global stage is not all upside. For decades they have obsessively yearned to be reconnected to the world. They felt cut off by the Pyrenees, by Franco, by not speaking English and even by a non-conforming railway gauge.
When a friend of mine saw Aznar alongside George Bush and Tony Blair at the pre-war summit in the Azores, she sighed: “When I got married I had to have my husband’s permission to open a bank account. Now I see the Spanish prime minister alongside the US president.”
It is not the non sequitur that it seems. Modernisation, social progress and internationalism are seen as being closely linked.
Spain was isolated in less obvious ways, too. Spaniards visiting London were amazed to see black faces. In Spain there were few immigrants. In 1492, the most celebrated year in Spanish history, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella — whose marriage had united Aragon and Castile — drove the Muslim Moors from Granada, their last foothold in Spain, and the Jews were expelled.
The Spanish have killed a lot of “Moors” since, but on African soil. Franco returned from a military expedition in Africa to lead the coup in Spain in 1936.
As I ruminated on the arrest of Moroccan terrorist suspects, I came across the lions that guard the entrance to Madrid’s neo-classical parliament building. The inscription reveals they are cast from the metal of cannons captured in the north African campaigns. Who knows what historic grievances are nursed by the murdering fanatics? Today Spain has a Muslim population for the first time since the fall of Granada. We know that the September 11 terrorists travelled to Spain for meetings that must have been important if they were worth the risk to their operational security involved in crossing frontiers. Al-Qaeda evidently feels comfortable operating in Spain and that is not reassuring.
So if Zapatero’s speech on Monday meant “stop the world, I want to get off”, it will not work. In case you are wondering why Aznar’s government was expected to win handsomely despite having led the country into an unpopular war, part of the answer is that the Socialists were not thought to be ready for office. Zapatero in opposition was free to promise the earth with no likelihood of being put to the test. Opposition pledges often make bad government policies.
What puzzles me about Zapatero’s speech is that he gave it after he had won. At the moment when the world anxiously sought a way to spin the Spanish election result as anything other than a triumph for violence, the prime minister-elect risked a worse interpretation still: that bombers could expect not only to change governments but also to break up the coalition in Iraq. That idea was reinforced when a group linked to Al-Qaeda purportedly said that Spain would be rewarded for Zapatero ’s pledge. I wouldn’t bank on it.
Ironically, the Spanish expect their new prime minister to find a face-saving formula and leave the soldiers in place to protect Iraqis from terrorists. Voters remember that a previous Socialist government promised to take Spain out of Nato. So far from fulfilling the pledge, one of that government’s leading lights, Javier Solana, became the alliance’s secretary-general. The cynical expectation that Zapatero will also make a U-turn is probably well founded, but if so his gaffe is the more regrettable.
I met Aznar the day after the Azores summit a year ago. Arguably the strain for him was greater than for Blair because he had even less popular support for the war. Yet while Blair looked haggard, Aznar appeared entirely comfortable in his skin. A slight figure with little charisma, he had nonetheless become a big statesman with broad shoulders.
My taxi driver is right. Something odd has happened. As we look at the world map, before our astonished eyes Spain has shrunk.
