History has a habit of creeping up on us when we least expect it. No one expected history to be made in the Spanish general election, but by yesterday morning the political map of Spain seemed to have turned upside down, with the centre-right enjoying the kind of mass support that the centre-left thought was its private property.
However, Mr Jose Maria Aznar's victory may not be quite as dramatic as at first appears. It is arguable that political labels have lagged behind social and cultural change in Spain for more than a decade. The shift to the centre-right happened in the 1980s; it is only today that the real politics of Spain dares to speak its name.
To say this is not to minimise Mr Aznar's achievement in Sunday's election. It is only to say that it probably does not herald any sort of "conservative revolution".
The scale of that achievement is certainly breathtaking. Mr Aznar's Partido Popular (PP) has not only won the first absolute majority for the centre-right since Franco's dictatorship. It has trounced the combined forces of the Socialist and Communist left everywhere except Andalusia, and made spectacular advances in the heartlands of Basque and Catalan nationalism.
Mr Aznar has also bucked the EU trend which has put centre-left parties in power in Britain, Italy, France and Germany. And he insists that he has nothing in common with the opposite movement in European politics: the rise of hard-right options in Austria and Switzerland. As of today, Mr Aznar presents himself as a leader of the European centre-right.
The number of PP parliamentary deputies leapt from 156 to 183, seven on the right side of the 176 required to rule without the smaller parties. Mr Aznar's outgoing administration had been constrained by having to seek deals with regional nationalists. Now he can, at least in theory, do what he likes.
He knows that such an overpowering conservative majority still sends shivers down the collective spine of many democrats in a country where memories of the Civil War and Franco's dictatorship are fresh and bitter. In his first speech to his supporters as the results poured in on Sunday night, he was careful to promise to govern "for all Spaniards", and to engage "in dialogue with all social forces". While Sunday's shift in the parliamentary landscape is undoubtedly seismic, Mr Aznar's triumph reflects trends that had been apparent in Spanish society for most of the 1990s. "Spain is no longer a country of the left," proclaimed the media closest to the PP yesterday. It's a legitimate piece of rhetoric and the traditional left parties certainly took a hammering on Sunday.
The Socialist Party (PSOE) lost 16 seats and nearly two million votes, its worst result since 1979. The Communist-led United Left (IU), which entered into a late and evidently unattractive pact with the PSOE, had its worst results ever, crashing from 21 seats to eight.
When we look more closely at the figures, however, we see that Mr Aznar did not take many votes from the left parties. The PP only won an extra 400,000 votes; the combined left lost more than three million. Mr Aznar has certainly proved an attractive alternative for some conservative regional nationalists and also gained because he represented stability and law and order in the face of ETA's renewed terror campaign.
A booming economy and a competent record in administration obviously increased his popularity. He also seems a much less frightening figure to middle-ground voters than he did four years ago. In 1996 a PSOE video presented Mr Aznar as a crypto-fascist Doberman, with some success. After four years in power, few Spanish voters believe he will really bite them, even with an absolute majority.
But he does not seem to have persuaded many socialist voters of the virtues of conservatism. He won handsomely on Sunday, not only because he got his own vote out on the day, but also because too many Socialists and Communists chose to stay at home. There were two major forces at work here. The first is the direction that the PSOE actually took when Felipe Gonzalez enjoyed his own absolute majorities in the 1980s. The Gonzalez governments saw their role much more as modernisers of the Spanish state and its economy rather than as redistributors of wealth.
The "reconversion" of Spanish industry under the Socialists saw far more pitched battles between the police and redundant workers than we saw under the PP in the late 1990s. The U-turn Mr Gonzalez brazenly took in dragging a rather unwilling Spain into NATO also showed how far the PSOE had moved from the radicalism of the 1970s.
If the socialists had only moved to the centre, more of their supporters might have been able to stomach the move. After all, most European social democratic parties have followed a similar route, quite successfully. Spanish workers have been at least as captivated by consumerism as their brothers and sisters to the north, perhaps more so. Spain is now a deeply materialistic society, and for years the Socialists delivered the goods.
But in the long years of the PSOE's monopoly of power, the party became enmeshed in a web of corruption, and sometimes behaved as if Spain was its private fiefdom. Mr Aznar is undoubtedly also guilty of cronyism, at the very least, but the PSOE could not convincingly attack him for it. Some of the PSOE leaders were implicated in a dirty war against ETA which involved torture and murder.
It is clear that a large section of the PSOE electorate, less afraid of Mr Aznar than previously, finally decided to punish the party for its abuses of power by abstaining in this election. The PSOE's general secretary, Mr Joaquin Almunia, implicitly admitted this when he resigned as the election results came in on Sunday night. If the PSOE is to recover its role as a credible opposition, it is going to have to go through a belated and painful process of renovation. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how Mr Aznar will rule with his hands untied. The dialogue he offered the Spanish people on election night has not been one of his characteristics to date. Consensus-building is going to be particularly necessary in the Basque country, where Mr Aznar's centralist ideology is diametrically opposed to the growing movement for Basque self-determination. His inflexible response to ETA's truce was accepted in most of Spain, but is bitterly resented in Bilbao. The Basque problem will be the greatest test of how he handles his new-found freedom of movement.
