Word: zapatero
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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...
...conservative party initially lent its support to the 2006 peace process, but soon began criticizing the government's strategies. And after ETA broke the truce by blowing up a parking garage at Madrid's Barajas airport in December of 2006, killing two, the PP has sharply criticized Zapatero for continuing to "negotiate with terrorists" and lying about it to the Spanish people...
...after today's assassination, the Popular Party seems to have consciously decided to avoid blaming Zapatero's government. "Everyone knows what I think," said Mariano Rajoy. "The guilty ones are the assassins." Gustavo de Arístegui, the PP's chairperson for foreign affairs, concurred: "The only responsible parties are the terrorists themselves," he said, adding, "All democratic Spaniards are enemies of terrorism. There is only one path to crush terrorism, and that is the rule...
When asked whether the killing would affect the election, Arístegui was unequivocal: "Absolutely not." 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...