Spain’s voters have sent a series of dramatic messages that will resonate far beyond Spain, affecting relations within Europe, with the United States and in terms of the ”war on terror”.
They reminded the world that regime change is best achieved through the ballot box; and that violence must not be allowed to win. Sunday’s high poll turnout, after the mass protests last Friday, reflected democracy at its best — courageous, robust and unintimidated.
They also served a warning that politicians who flout public opinion, as outgoing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar did over Iraq, may pay a heavy price.
The bombs were a brutal reminder of that unpopular war. Many in Spain saw them as the Islamist terrorists’ long predicted payback — and a direct result of Aznar’s stance.
Voters also objected strongly to perceived attempts by the People’s Party to manipulate or ”spin” opinion over whether Eta or terrorists linked to al-Qaeda were responsible for the bombings.
Such messages will send a quiet shiver through British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Number 10 and President George W Bush’s White House. Both incumbents are facing elections in the not too distant future; both still struggle to justify their Iraq policy and the conduct of the war on terror; and both lead people who now wonder, with suddenly focused concern, whether their trains, planes, and citizens will be next.
The abrupt change of government in Spain will alter the balance of power within the European Union and between what US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld described as the ”old” and ”new” Europe.
In Aznar, Blair and Bush have lost a key partner; in Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Spain’s Socialist prime minister-designate, France and Germany may have gained one.
The untried Zapatero is in effect a wild card whose policies could impact unpredictably on issues ranging from the EU Constitution to the Middle East and Gibraltar.
Little wonder perhaps that the Polish government on Monday publicly regretted Aznar’s defeat. Warsaw’s military links with Spain in Iraq, and more broadly in terms of its political aspirations and objectives within the EU, are now inevitably thrown into some doubt.
One effect of Zapatero’s victory may be to reduce the impetus for post-Iraq fence-mending with Washington by Paris and Berlin. Jacques Chirac’s France has pursued a truce of expediency since the United Nations Security Council ructions a year ago. But the fundamental French objection to what it sees as hegemonistic US tendencies, not least in respect of the war on terror, is unchanged.
If the French decide Spain’s political upheaval provides an opportunity to reassert a more independent, collective European line in opposition to the US, they may well seize upon it. Such temptations may only be increased if Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s always problematic political position in Italy deteriorates.
The White House put a brave face on events this week, with Bush making a congratulatory telephone call to Zapatero.
But there can be no disguising the fact that Zapatero’s renewed vow to bring Spanish troops home from Iraq potentially blows a gaping hole in the West’s anti-terrorist front. If enacted, it will be seen in the Muslim world as a success for Islamist extremist violence.
Given the key importance afforded Iraq in the war on terror, Zapatero’s declaration on Sunday that ”the [Iraq] war has been a disaster, the occupation continues to be a disaster” is profoundly dismaying for Washington and London.
Early in Bush’s term, the US agreed to provide Spain with intelligence assistance in combating the terrorist menace presented by the Basque separatists of Eta. After September 11, that cooperation was extended into the pursuit of Islamist terrorists operating in Spain and its North African neighbours.
There is no suggestion that Zapatero will in any way curtail such anti-terror cooperation. Indeed, he made a point of stressing that the opposite would be the case.
But the close, personal relationship between Aznar and Bush will not easily be replaced. It is as if, overnight, the US relationship with Spain has gone from one of trusted intimacy to a slightly strained, slightly wary friendship.
This change could be of greater significance given the fact that, on the face of it, Spain’s March 11 amounted to another dreadful intelligence failure.
March 11 in Madrid has provided other lessons, too. Uncontrolled events have once again exposed the illusion that any number of officially imposed security measures — from plain-clothes police on the tube to sky marshals, draconian anti-terrorism laws and military campaigns — can stop a Madrid happening again, anywhere, any time.
Bush’s boasts of success in the war on terror in his State of the Union address in January now sound more alarming than reassuring and Blair’s previous talk of ”relentless” warfare, and his bellicose vow at Labour’s spring conference to save humankind and defeat terrorist evil by any means, were discomforting — although the intentions were the opposite.
Blair’s and Bush’s determination is not in doubt. The questions after Madrid are whether they really know how to achieve their aims; whether their methods, already deeply divisive, can work; whether they can ultimately hold the US-Europe anti-terror coalition together; or whether their tactics will progressively exacerbate a global confrontation. — Â