The strangest thing about the current Spanish general election campaign, which enters its final week today, is its apparent normality. The electric frisson which marked the great battles between Mr Felipe Gonzalez's Socialists and the Spanish right over the last 20 years is missing, along with the charismatic leadership of Mr Gonzalez himself. Whatever happens next Sunday, nobody is likely to claim that a seismic shift has taken place.
A last-minute pact between the Socialists (PSOE), under their new leader, Mr Joaquin Almunia, and their bitter critics in the Communist-led United Left coalition (IU) is the biggest surprise factor so far. This alliance just might forestall the expected return to power of the centre-right minority government led by Mr Jose Maria Aznar. However, three opinion polls this weekend indicate that his Partido Popular (PP) is still well ahead of the PSOE, though not far enough to win an absolute majority.
Even if the left should win, it is unlikely to change radically the course steered by Mr Aznar. "We are not talking about Lenin storming the Winter Palace here," an IU candidate, Mr Antera Ruiz, declared rather ruefully to a rally in Madrid's so-called Red Belt yesterday afternoon. He appealed to doubting supporters to "hold their noses" in the company of the PSOE, in the interests of a moderate left government.
For most IU voters, the stench of corruption, and of the dirty war against ETA, from the PSOE has long been insupportable. However, this reminder, in front of a row of Socialist guests at the rally, clearly embarrassed the IU leader, Mr Francisco Frutos.
And if the polls have erred in the other direction, and Mr Aznar can rule unrestricted by alliances with small parties, no big changes are on the cards either. He is accused, probably rightly, of conniving at Gen Pinochet's return to Chile, but the idea that he or his circle are themselves closet Nazis is not taken seriously by anyone anymore. This is despite the enigma that there is no significant party to his right, in a country with a stronger authoritarian tradition than France or Austria.
In the last election in 1996, things were much more polarised, and the PSOE broadcast a video associating the PP with Hitler's atrocities.
In the event, the PP outvoted the PSOE but failed to get an absolute majority. This forced Mr Aznar to seek support from Catalan and Basque nationalists, a strange cohabitation given the PP's visceral aversion to "separatism". But power passed peacefully from left to right for the first time since the 1930s, and Mr Aznar has shown no signs of nostalgia for the fascist past.
The PP government has been competent in most fields, and not very noticeably to the right of the PSOE in economic terms. In fact, to the fury of the Socialists, Mr Aznar has struck up a warm friendship with the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair. Against expectations, the PP has successfully led Spain into the first round of European Monetary Union, and unemployment, while still high, is declining steadily.
Today, the PSOE accuses Mr Aznar of an undemocratic obsession with controlling the media, and with making his cronies beneficiaries of stock option bonanzas in privatisations. There is more than a little truth in both charges. But they sound rather hypocritical coming from Mr in Almunia, who has failed to renovate his own party convincingly.
On the one hand, this year's lack of polemics could be read as a welcome sign that Spanish democracy has matured into the anodyne consensus which makes most EU countries relatively safe and happy, if rather boring, bodies politic. On the other, there is something disturbingly unreal about a campaign which fails to engage with the issues raised by ETA's assassination of a Socialist leader only two weeks ago.
While that killing has opened a dangerous rift between more moderate Basque nationalists and both the PP and PSOE, there has been hardly any constructive debate on the lost opportunities of the Basque peace process, arguably the greatest failure of the Aznar government. The normality of the campaign may be deceptive.