Enda O'Doherty looks at the European press this week in the wake of the Madrid bombings.
The carnage of March 11th in Madrid continued to dominate the European press throughout the week, bringing many of the continent's leading writers and analysts into print to examine the causes of the defeat of the Popular Party and the nature of the threat which Europe now faced from Islamist terrorism.
The surprise victory of Mr Zapatero's socialists was welcome news to most commentators on the political left and to all those opposed to the invasion of Iraq. There was, however, a major problem: could one really welcome a political victory that looked as if it had been brought about by a terrorist act? Certainly not. Commentators on the left, therefore, were concerned to attribute the PSOE victory to the sins of the outgoing government; those on the right, however, saw a more direct, and extremely sinister, manipulation by al-Qaeda.
Typical of the former camp was the editorialist of Le Monde, who wrote: "It would certainly be unacceptable to think that terrorists had been able to manipulate an election through the deaths of innocents. To believe that Osama bin Laden, from the recesses of his Afghan cave, could choose who should govern in the land of the 'infidels' would be insupportable. But what changed the vote of the Spaniards, swung the undecided and mobilised the abstentionists was the impression the outgoing government gave of wanting to divert the investigation in a direction which would have been electorally profitable to itself."
This is an interpretation endorsed by many others, including London's Financial Times and Madrid's El País. The distinguished founder of that paper, Juan Luis Cebrian, thought that manipulation of the news in the days immediately following the massacre was one reason for the PP's electoral collapse, but not the only one. Cebrian singled out as an alienating factor for many voters Mr Aznar's "tiresome insistence on turning his particular obsessions and debatable ideas about Spain, the Spanish and the way they must be governed into dogmas of faith".
Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian, attempted a nuanced reading of the reasons behind the result. The accusations of right-wing American commentators that the Spanish had appeased the terrorists were crass nonsense, he insisted. "So far as the Spanish voters' intentions are concerned, the election result was not subjectively a victory for al-Qaeda.
"But it is, as Marxists used to say, an objective victory for al-Qaeda. The Madrid bombings look likely to do exactly what a message posted on a radical Islamist website months ago said they should do: exploit the election moment to knock Spain out of the 'Crusader-Zionist' coalition in Iraq. Conclusion: terror works."
For Madrid's right-wing ABC it was not any fault of Mr Aznar or his would-be successor, Mr Rajoy, which lost the election for the PP, simply "the brutal impact of an attack that led to the search for a scapegoat within the government".
The Daily Telegraph was scathing about what it saw as the self-deception of many European peaceniks. "Large numbers of Spanish voters succumbed to the delusion that if Mr Aznar had not lent support to the Anglo- American coalition then their homeland would be safer. The idea abounds that if the West somehow withdrew from Iraq then all this would stop. The desire not to take our enemies at face value, in word and deed, is the hallmark of much of contemporary Europe."
A clear realisation of the need to confront militant Islamism was not a position confined to the political right, however. Jean-Marie Colombani, director of Le Monde, wrote: "It would be as vain as it would be absurd and cowardly to think such and such a country more or less spared according to the placing of the cursor of its foreign policy. Our societies are easy targets. They are attacked in the name of a battle 'against the Crusaders and the Jews', on the basis of an alleged oppression of which the Muslim community is the victim." This is an enemy, wrote Colombani, which does not respond to military dissuasion. "Even if it was weakened by the Afghanistan operations, it has neither territory nor population to defend, nor civil or military installations to protect." Fighting this adversary does not involve a war in the classical sense, still less a war against Iraq. With whom would one sign an armistice or conclude a treaty? "The strength of al-Qaeda resides in the fact that materially or locally it virtually doesn't exist. It is more an idea than a general staff; it has at its disposal not soldiers but faithful. It has only one programme: hatred."