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Spain Votes

Back to the Future with Zapatero

By Manuel Meyer in Madrid

It was a bitter campaign full of recriminations. But Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero emerged victorious on Sunday. Still, despite gaining seats in the parliament, he has a difficult road ahead.

He clearly enjoyed the adulation of his supporters. Spain's Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero even allowed himself a few jumps for joy after election returns on Sunday night showed that his socialist PSOE party had been returned to power with 43.7 percent of the vote. Spain, Zapatero said, had opted for a fresh term free from confrontation and tension.

Yet for all of his relief at having eked out a victory over his opponent Mariano Rajoy, whose conservative Popular Party raked in 40.1 percent of the vote, Zapatero is faced with a difficult task. The re-elected prime minister is not wrong when he claims that many voted against the bitter row between the right and left which erupted during the campaign. But a good chunk of the Spanish electorate remains dissatisfied with Zapatero's government.

Indeed, the prime minister's campaign seemed designed to sidestep voter discontent. Instead of a long list of campaign promises, Zapatero served up a generous portion of fear, warning his countrymen against a "return of the right." Regular reminders that it was the PP, with former Prime Minister José María Aznar at the helm, which led Spain into the Iraq War -- and which resulted in the Madrid terrorist attacks in 2004 -- were an integral part of his campaign appearances. The strategy seems to have worked.

Making Life Difficult for Zapatero

Still, Zapatero wasn't the only one taking a hard line. For four years, opposition leader Rajoy has been following a policy of aggressive confrontation. A number of government projects proposed by Zapatero's party were torpedoed by Rajoy's "out of principle." His campaign likewise left little doubt as to where he stood. Early on in the contest, he showed a weakness for neoconservative economic and social policies. He likewise rarely missed an opportunity to highlight the dangers of illegal immigration. But his conservatives were unable to lure the political center with their hard-line message.

Rajoy said on Sunday night that he planned to continue at the head of the PP. But it seems likely that his party's failure will result in a more moderate course in the next four years. Still, Rajoy on Sunday did not sound like a defeated candidate. While he acknowledged his defeat, he also pointed out that the PP had made the greatest gains of any party in the election.

Zapatero, meanwhile, looks set to lead a minority government once again. He had been hoping for an absolute majority, but fell short, winning 169 seats to the PP's 154 seats. Even if the PP pulls back from the recent years of radical opposition, the Socialists will still have to coordinate policy proposals with other parties in parliament.

The prime minister, though, has reasons for jumping up and down on Sunday evening. His party won an additional five parliamentary seats -- and even more importantly, it did so with the help of Catalonia and the Basque Country.

The Socialists' Autonomy Policies Pay Off

Against all expectations, the Socialists were able to notch up a historic election victory in Catalonia, which is Spain's strongest region economically. The party will now have 25 members seated in the regional parliament in Barcelona.

The victory came at the expense of the radical-nationalist Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), an on-again, off-again coalition partner in the Catalonia regional government. The party has made life difficult for the Catalonia Socialists (PSC) with its constant demands for greater autonomy from Spain. The concessions PSC made to the regionalists often went too far for Zapatero's taste. Nevertheless, and to the Socialists' surprise, it did just as little damage to the party's image as the constant power outages and chaotic train service. ERC lost a total of five seats in the national parliament in Madrid -- and with only three members of parliament now, it will hardly be able to demand the kind of concession in exchange for support as it did in the past.

The moderate Catalan nationalist party Convergencia I Unio (CIU), which picked up an additional mandate, bringing its total number to 11, could become much more interesting to the Catalonia Socialists as a coalition partner.

Zapatero's courageous policies of decentralization have clearly paid off. The subject of deep hostility from the conservative opposition, who accused him of gambling away "Spanish unity," Zapatero allowed his party friends in Barcelona to create a new regional statute for Catalonia that not only provided the region with greater autonomy from Madrid, but also defined it for the first time as a "nation."

Gains in the Basque Country

The Socialists also gained in the Basque Country, where the party took votes away from the moderate nationalists to gain more than any other party, with 39 percent. Here, Zapatero, by seeking to open dialogue with the Basque separatists, scored points for attempting to put an end to the "ice age" imposed by the PP party. The Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), which governs the region, barely managed to hang on to 22 percent of the vote and will lose one of the seven seats it holds in the national parliament in Madrid. It was a tough blow for Basque Prime Minister Juan Jose Ibarretxe, who in October failed in his bid to launch a Kosovo-style referendum on independence for the region. His project now suffers from a serious legitimacy problem and he will also have less means to pressure Zapatero, for whom the independence referendum proposal caused numerous migraines.

Patxi Lopez, the head of the Socialist Party in the Basque region, described Sunday's result as a historic victory for "all the victims of terrorism," especially Isaias Carrasco, a former councillor for the Socialists who was shot and killed in the Basque Country on Friday. Meanwhile, calls by Basque radical separatists and ETA supporters for a boycott of the vote -- after the Basque-separatist ANV party was shut out of the election -- appeared to have the desired chilling effect on voters. Numerous Basques shied away from the ballot box on Sunday under pressure from separatists who had called it an "illegal election." Voter turnout fell by 8 percent to a historic low. This, despite the fact that Carrasco's family appealed to Basques to turn out the vote. "Anyone who wants to show their support for my father should vote," said his tearful daughter in a plea to voters.

It was a defeat for democracy. But the person suffering the greatest setback in Spanish parliamentary elections was Gaspar Llamazares of the United Left (IU) party. His party is Spain's third-biggest leftist party nationally. But the party lost three of its five seats in parliament and lost its status as an official parliamentary group. Llamazares announced his resignation on Sunday and blamed the "injustice" of the electoral system for his party's loss. Spain's electoral system favors major national parties as well as smaller regional formations.