Europe, Headlines

SPAIN: Pre-Election Climate Marked by Political Assassination

José Antonio Gurriarán

MADRID, Mar 7 2008 (IPS) - While the polls have been predicting a high turnout for Sunday’s general elections in Spain, the murder of a former socialist town councillor in the Basque Country has created tension ahead of the elections, which Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is expected to win.

Former town councillor Isaías Carrasco, 42, was shot Friday outside his house in the northern Basque region town of Mondragón, and died shortly afterwards in the hospital, according to official reports. He was shot three times in the back.

The authorities blame the attack on the Basque separatist group ETA.

The governing Socialist Party (PSOE) and the rightwing Popular Party (PP) immediately called off their election campaigns.

The effect that the murder might have on voters is unclear. The latest opinion polls, whose results cannot be published in Spain within five days of elections, pointed to a two to five point lead for Zapatero over his PP rival Mariano Rajoy.

The polls also forecast voter turnout of around 72 percent, which according to analysts would favour the prime minister, while a high abstention rate would benefit Rajoy.

The slight advantage pointed to by the polls for Zapatero would not give the PSOE the absolute majority it would need to govern without the support of small parties like the United Left (IU, an alliance of the communists and the greens) and nationalist parties.

The latest poll published by the conservative El Mundo newspaper, which is closely aligned with the PP, showed Rajoy with 39 percent ratings and Zapatero with 43 percent, while predicting 77 percent turnout.

The two candidates were making an all-out final campaign effort, Zapatero following the dream of gaining an absolute majority in parliament that would enable him to govern without depending on nationalist parties from Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia, and Rajoy attempting to ward off defeat, or to at least lose by the narrowest possible margin.

The memory of the March 2004 elections, in which the polls failed to foresee Zapatero’s victory, means that neither candidate feels that his victory or loss is a sure thing.

That year the PSOE, which was expected to lose the elections, took just under 43 percent of the vote compared to nearly 38 percent for the PP. It was the first time that Zapatero and Rajoy faced off at the polls.

But the elections that year were shaken up by the worst terrorist attack in Spanish history, committed three days earlier by Islamist extremists, who blew up several commuter trains during morning rush hour, killing 191 people and injuring 1,700.

“We are going to win the sprint in the final stretch, like race car drivers and cyclists do, in the last second of the last minute,” Rajoy told a rally of 25,000 supporters Thursday night in the city of Valencia, the capital of the eastern province of that name, both of which are governed by the PP.

Zapatero, meanwhile, addressed a crowd of 40,000 followers in the northeastern city of Barcelona, calling for support at the ballot box “to continue implementing our social and economic policies and policies aimed at integration and respect for immigrants and at cooperation with developing countries, and to avoid the counter-reforms proposed by the Popular Party.”

Former socialist prime minister Felipe González (1982-1996), who took part in the rally with the candidate, defended Zapatero’s domestic and foreign policies and chanted the slogan of the socialists in Catalonia, “If You Don’t Go, They Will Come Back” – a call for PSOE supporters to flock to the polls.

IU leader Gaspar Llamazares, who supported the PSOE’s social policies in the last legislature, offered to form a leftist government with Zapatero in the likely event that the socialists fail to win an absolute majority.

It would be a coalition without precedents since democracy was restored in Spain after the 1975 death of dictator General Francisco Franco, who had ruled the country since 1939.

Carrasco’s murder cut short the campaigns, which were to end in closing ceremonies Friday.

Rajoy based his campaign on the slogan “Spain is worse off than it was four years ago. Vote for me”, and on a hypothetical girl that he dreams about, for the future. “I want this girl who is born in Spain to have a home, a family, and parents who have work,” he said at the end of Monday’s debate with Zapatero, and at the end of a number of speeches he has given.

The theme of the girl – “la niña” – has triggered controversy and is the focus of around 50 videos placed on the Internet.

The Cuatro TV station reported that its origins can be traced back to Franco’s granddaughter, Carmencita, whose grandparents voiced a similar phrase half a century ago. The station also pointed to similar words used by Mexico’s current conservative President Felipe Calderón in a speech in a stadium in 2006, when he was a candidate.

According to the station, the “coincidence” can be attributed to the fact that Rajoy’s adviser Antonio Solá had worked for both Calderón and Guatemala’s rightwing Patriotic Party, which used the theme “Mano dura, cabeza y corazón” (roughly translated as “firm hand, reason and heart”), that the Spanish PP candidate has also made use of in his slogan “Con cabeza y corazón” (“with reason and heart”).

Zapatero, in the meantime, said at the close of Thursday’s rally that “My aim is to govern only with the support of my party” – a statement he repeated in Madrid, surrounded by artists, intellectuals and academics making up the Zapatero Support Platform, which collected 25,000 signatures in Spain and abroad.

But Friday’s Basque Country murder has thrown a mantle of uncertainty over the results of Sunday’s elections, in which voters are called on to choose between conservative policies or a deepening of the PSOE’s social reforms.