SPAIN:Zapatero has shown he is now the master of a party that once gave him merely lukewarm support, writes PADDY WOODWORTH
QUITE SMALL margins can make very big differences in the future of countries.
Last Sunday, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) bested the conservative Partido Popular (PP) by 3.5 percentage points. But this was enough to turn, at last, the bruised and battered PSOE outgoing prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, into the master of his party and the undisputed leader of his country. He now has the wind in his sails for his reforming and modernising policies.
Conversely, the failure of the conservative Partido Popular (PP) to deliver a killer punch to the man it had accused of breaking up Spain and surrendering to the terrorists of Eta casts a big question mark over the abrasive hard-right strategy pursued in opposition by its leader, Mariano Rajoy. His leadership is probably secure in the short term. But it was notable how his own manner sweetened even as he digested the bitter results on election night.
"I have congratulated Zapatero and wished him luck, for the good of Spain," he told his disappointed followers. From any other leader, this might have seemed like a grudging acknowledgement. From Rajoy, at least as we have known him since he unexpectedly lost the 2004 elections following the Madrid train bombings, it was an expression of unprecedented generosity.
Pío García Escudero, the PP's campaign manager, had set the new tone a little earlier. With 80 per cent of the votes counted, he not only conceded victory to the PSOE, but acknowledged that they had won in a fair and honourable contest. No one would have guessed this from the PP's savage attacks only days earlier, in which "liar" was the least offensive insult of choice against the prime minister.
Many observers have commented that the political air in Spain had become irrespirable (unbreathable) over the last four years. Suddenly it seems as if everyone will be able to inhale freely once again.
Zapatero's results fall short of his stated aspiration, the kind of absolute majority won for the PSOE by Felipe González in the early 1980s. But they are still remarkable - the best percentage share for the socialists since 1986, and only 1 per cent short of the PP's best-ever result (which indeed yielded an absolute majority) in 2000.
This is a very satisfying outcome for a prime minister who came to his first term in 2004 very green indeed, and immediately became the target of unprecedented attacks from the PP, which even questioned the legitimacy of the election results.
Starting on that very shaky base, Zapatero proceeded to take a whole series of risks: he withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq; he renegotiated Catalonia's autonomy statute; he legalised gay marriage; he regularised many illegal immigrants; he reopened painful questions about the legacy of the civil war and the dictatorship. Most controversially, he initiated a peace process in the Basque Country, only to find his olive branch finally spattered in blood by new bombings and shootings from Eta.
Throughout this whole period, his position has been undermined by very lukewarm support from much of the PSOE establishment, and from El País, the most influential newspaper on the centre-left, where some of the PP's concerns were echoed in softer terms. This may explain why in some instances, especially his handling of the Basque peace process, he sometimes seemed to lack the courage of his own convictions, and failed to follow through effectively on his own initiatives.
Everyone loves a winner, however, and he has a much stronger set of cards today than in 2004.
Nevertheless, he faces a struggling economy, and a political landscape which is both very challenging, and quite radically changed by the elections.
In the Basque Country, Eta's assassination of a PSOE member on the eve of elections shows the group can still have an impact on Spanish affairs, and that its contempt for parliamentary democracy is undiminished.
Zapatero's record showing in the Basque provinces on Sunday strengthens his hand here. But he must find a way of reaching out to the disenfranchised voters of the banned Batasuna, many of them disenchanted with Eta's violence, without making concessions to a terrorist group which seems to have no desire to enter real negotiations, if the Basque conflict is to be resolved.
Above all, he faces a country more clearly divided into two great opposing blocks than at any time since the civil war. The PP may have lost the elections, but 40 per cent of voters supported a party whose rhetoric often sounds more like the French National Front than the reasoned polemics of Sarkozy, for example.
Meanwhile, the more radical left has been trounced in this election, and Zapatero will probably have to rely on centre-right Catalan and/or Basque nationalists in order to serve out his term. His advantage here is that the PP have so alienated all other parties that their natural tendency will be to support the prime minister.