Word: socialistics
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...long after the polls closed here at 8 pm, supporters of Zapatero began dancing outside Socialist Party headquarters in Madrid. Although the official count wouldn't be released for several hours, the crowd was confident that their man had won the national elections - decisively. And indeed by 11:30pm, with roughly 90% of the ballots counted, the Socialists had won 43.87% of the vote, while the opposition Popular Party held...
...victory speech Sunday night, Spain's newly re-elected socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, spoke of unity, claiming that "Spaniards have spoken with clarity, and they have decided to open a new era - a new era without antagonism, an era that excludes confrontation, an era that looks for agreement when it comes to affairs of State." But both the campaign that preceded the election and the results themselves suggest much the opposite - that Spain will become even more polarized between right and left than it already...
Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Popular Party leader and election opponent Mariano Rajoy immediately suspended all campaign activities, and the Spanish parliament convened a special session late on Friday afternoon to express its unanimous condemnation of the assassination. Socialist spokesperson Diego Lopez Garrido confirmed that Sunday's election would be held as planned, assuring the press that "no matter how hard ETA tries," it will not impede "Spaniards' freedom of expression." Yet the question of whether - and how - the killing might affect the vote was on everyone's mind...
...Juan Aviles, security expert at the Spain's National Distance University, agreed. "It's not going to influence the campaign. It's true that some could see it as evidence that Zapatero's strategy of negotiating with ETA was mistaken, but voters could also show solidarity with the [Socialist] victim...
...latest polls, conducted before the assassination, gave the Socialists a 4.1% lead over the Popular Party, and with voter turnout emerging as a key factor in these elections, the effect of today's killing is, in fact, hard to predict. Jose Ramon Montero, political scientist at Madrid's Autonomous University, believes the assassination "will certainly have an effect, but perhaps in a different direction than you might expect. Certainly there is a parallel with what happened in the last elections," he says, referring to the surprise ouster of the Popular Party government in the wake of the 2004 Madrid subway...