Word: spainã
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...polls from the six months leading up to Spain??s national election—including those taken as late as last week—Mariano Rajoy looked certain to coast to victory. The handpicked successor of outgoing Prime Minister José María Aznar, Rajoy ran on a strong antiterrorism platform; but after the recent bombings in Madrid, fear and suspicion gripped the country and Spaniards swept Socialist leader José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero into victory. If we didn’t know it before, this weekend’s election in Spain provided...
First the merits: The Spanish electorate did indeed switch its support from the Popular Party to the Socialists in the wake of the bombing, precipitating a shift in Spain??s Iraqi policy. Conservatives are right to point out that al Qaeda will likely view the Spanish elections as a major coup, a successful intervention into the domestic politics of a western democracy. This success could well invigorate and energize al Qaeda, and even encourage similar acts in the future...
Furthermore, Zapatero’s position on Iraq hardly marks a dramatic shift in Spanish policy, a point that has received surprisingly little attention in the press. Zapatero’s pledge to remove Spain??s 1,300 troops—which constitute less than 1 percent of the total Iraqi occupation force—by the end of June, failing a United Nations mandate, certainly didn’t win him any friends in the Bush administration. But the UN is quite likely to issue a mandate, making the chances of a Spanish withdrawal slim...
...fact, charges of Spanish appeasement are concerned less with policy shifts than with the rationale behind them. Conservative pundits are really out to make a point about national character—namely that ours is stronger than Spain??s, and the rest of Europe’s too, for that matter. As Brooks wrote last Tuesday, “today more than any other, it really does appear that Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.” The gender coding here is no accident—we manly Americans would never have folded like those...
Voters were also alienated by the Popular Party’s sharp condemnation of spontaneous anti-government protests on the eve of election. And resentment only deepened after the protests received minimal coverage on state-owned TVE, Spain??s main television station, which chose instead to air an anti-ETA documentary. By the time many Spanish voters reached the polls, they were moved more by anger toward their own government than by fear of additional al Qaeda reprisals...