The gap between Spain's two main parties has widened into a chasm over the last two weeks. In unprecedented hearings, their leaders have given a parliamentary commission of inquiry diametrically opposite accounts of the March 11th bombings in Madrid, which killed 191 people and wounded hundreds more, writes Paddy Woodworth
Relations between the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), a centre-left party banned under Gen Franco's long dictatorship, and the Popular Party (PP), a centre-right grouping which fuses Christian Democrats and recycled Francoists in an iron grip, have never been warm.
Now, however, they are well below freezing point, and it is hard to see how the ice can be melted.
You might expect that a common enemy, the Islamist terrorists who bombed Madrid and could well strike again, would have brought these two democratic parties closer together, as the terrorism of the Basque group ETA did in the very recent past. Instead, the March 11th attacks - or rather the way each party responded to them - has them at each other's throats.
Two weeks ago, the former PP leader and ex-prime minister, José María Aznar, flatly denied to the commission that his government had made any mistakes whatsoever in insisting that ETA, and not Islamists, were the main suspects for the bombings. The PP held to this view right up to the general elections which took place three days later.
Such insistence, against a rising pile of hard evidence to the contrary, favoured the PP's chances in the election, since Aznar's deeply unpopular backing for the US/British occupation of Iraq would be blamed for a rise in Islamist terror.
The PP still argues that ETA were probably the masterminds behind the attack.
At the inquiry, Aznar accused the new PSOE government of failing to follow up leads which suggested this - a very serious charge against an administration which faces a high level of terrorist threat.
He also accused the Socialists of orchestrating the widespread illegal demonstrations against the PP on the day before the elections - a "day of reflection" under Spanish law, during which all political campaigning is prohibited. The electorate then reversed all opinion polls by dumping the PP and handing the reins of power to the PSOE.
"It was others who lied, lied and lied obstinately, they perverted the truth and effectively supported a most serious breach of the rules of our democracy," he told the commission, in a reply which amounts to questioning the legitimacy of the elections.
Last Monday it was the PSOE's turn. The party leader and victor in those elections, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, bluntly accused Aznar of attempting a "massive deception" of Spanish public opinion over the crucial pre-election days - again, a very serious charge.
Basing his case on a hefty stack of police reports, he was able to show that all the strongest evidence points to Islamist bombings. However, he may not have been prudent in contradicting Aznar to the point where he ruled out ETA involvement definitively.
While it remains a very unlikely hypothesis, there is some faint circumstantial evidence of contact between the two groups.
Much of Zapatero's contribution rang true, not least his account of the petulant and arrogant tone that Aznar adopted during the crisis. And the PSOE leader went a long way to rebut the allegation that the party had orchestrated the illegal demonstrations. The balance of evidence is that these were largely spontaneous.
Zapatero had one advantage over Aznar at the hearings: he only had to face hostile questions from the PP, since all other parties more or less support the PSOE's position on these events.
And the tone and language of his interrogation - it is not too strong a word - by the former PP government spokesman, Eduardo Zaplana, betrayed a party rattled to the point of hysteria by its defeat and subsequent isolation.
He accused Zapatero of speaking "more like an agitator than a prime minister", a phrase that surely tells us more about the speaker's background than about Zapatero's conduct.
It is remarkable, indeed, how Zapatero's image is being transformed, either by the pressure of events or by a brilliant PR team. His less-than-robust performance in opposition (and unusually large eyes) led to his being derided as "Bambi". Now he is showing a lethal steel edge behind the charm.
Even El Mundo, a newspaper generally unfriendly to the Socialists, spoke in grudging admiration in a leader yesterday of his metamorphosis into an "authentic political killer".
He was particularly effective in despatching the canard, occasionally repeated even by Irish Times columnists, that his decision to withdraw troops from Iraq was a capitulation to terrorism. He was simply fulfilling a key democratic mandate, he argued, and had neither sought nor won any favours with al-Qaeda, since he had subsequently dispatched troops to Afghanistan, where there was a full UN mandate for their presence.
Spain remains a target for Islamists, he pointed out, and it is "brutal, unacceptable and a slander to describe as cowardly the courageous people of Spain".
Fine words, indeed. But it is hard not to feel some empathy with El Mundo when it laments the fact that this parliamentary inquiry into a grim atrocity has been characterised by Spain's major parties accusing each other of conduct unacceptable in a democracy. Whether Zapatero's constructive proposal for a special inter-party pact on Islamist terrorism can reverse this very negative impression remains to be seen.
woodworth@ireland.com
Paddy Woodworth is the author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy. (Yale, 2003)