AN ordinary man, extraordinary only in his uncommon share of common sense and single minded application to hard work. That is the image Mr Jose Maria Aznar, who was yesterday sworn in by King Juan Carlos as Spain's new Prime Minister, to present.

But the Spanish public finds it hard to believe that an ordinary man can become prime minister, particularly when he is the first right winger, to oust a Socialist government at the polls since 1934. Mr Aznar, leader off the conservative Partido Popular, remains a tantalising enigma, whose political convictions are as elusive as his physical appearance is unprepossessing.

In some ways he is a caricaturist's dream. He is a small, stiff man who seems to have great difficulty in smiling. His wife, Ana Botella, and his PR people are said to have persuaded him to make a big effort in this department, but the result is usually unconvincing.

He is considerably more appealing in the flesh than on TV, and occasionally betrays a shy, boyish charm. But it is the charm of the school swot who has suddenly become animated in talking about his chemistry set, and not the magnetic charisma exuded by his immediate predecessor, Mr Felipe Gonzalez.

His moustache is the item most useful in cartoons, so that he often looks like Charlie Chaplin playing Hitler or, his more paranoid detractors would say, Hitler playing Charlie Chaplin.

Mr Aznar, however, is not a laughing matter, and is most unlikely to emerge as a closet fascist, despite some early indications to the contrary. He was born in 1953 into a middle class family in Salamanca, a conservative Madrid suburb. His grand father was an eminent Francoist journalist, and his father followed, less successfully, in his Mr Aznar, as a teenager, was indiscreet enough to write to a newspaper lamenting the decline of pure fascist values in the Francoist establishment, but by the time he reached university he shunned politics altogether.

This itself was exceptional, at least among those who subsequently pursued political careers, in the turbulent years before the collapse of Francoism. During the 1970s most of his peers would have been militant leftists, some pragmatic Francoists. The extreme right was also active on campus.

Mr Aznar, however, makes a virtue of belonging to the silent majority of students who kept their heads down and passed their exams. He says he became a tax inspector, not out of vocation, but because it was the quickest way to earn enough money to marry his girlfriend, Ana Botella. The devoted couple even their worst enemies would endorse this cliche - now have three children.

Ana Botella is certainly Mr Aznar's greatest fan, and one of his few intimate friends: he admits he has to force himself to join in the demanding social whirl of Spanish politics. Some observers reckon Ana Botella is also a major political influence.

Whatever about that, she epitomises the style of prominent PP women: clothes just on the loud side of elegant, flaunting famously short, mini skirts into their 40s. She is said to have ambitions to become Spain's Hillary Clinton.

THE Aznar household is a tangible, and no doubt genuine, expression of the PP's vague but frequently expressed support for "family values". Like many PP policies, such support, when translated into practical politics, gets a little mushy, more rhetoric than reality.

While Mr Aznar will not support an expansion of Spain's restrictive abortion legislation, he has resisted pressure to restrict it further. And you will certainly not find him moving to outlaw divorce.

This tendency to espouse right wing discourse, coupled with a reluctance to translate it into proposals which would be unpopular in Spain of the 1990s, is something Mr Aznar shares with his party.

He will say that he has "total contempt for anyone who doesn't make an effort in life", and that he has "never believed in theories which blame society for individual errors". But he was at pains, during his election campaign, to stress that he had, no intention of dismantling the welfare state.

He has even admitted to reading poetry every day, and cleverly paid a visit to a veteran communist poet, Rafael Alberti, at the start of his election campaign, something a nostalgic Francoist would never have done.

Mr Aznar voted for Mr Adolfo Suarez's centrist party in the first post Franco elections in 1977, but two years later he joined his wife in the ranks of Mr Manuel Fraga's right wing Alianza Popular. By the time this party was reconstituted as the Partido Popular in 1989, Mr Aznar had emerged as Fraga's replacement as leader.

Since then he has increased the PP's parliamentary representation by 50 per cent through consolidating a party that is conservative without being either Francoist or Thatcherite, although both elements can be found within its ranks.

His public image was greatly enhanced by the courage he showed when an ETA bomb blew up the car in which he was travelling. He calmly walked to hospital to have his minor wounds treated and was back to normal business within hours.

However, the Spanish electorate has remained suspicious of anything which can be tagged right wing, and did not give Mr Aznar the landslide majority he had expected over a power weary and discredited PSOE last March.

He has just finished two months of negotiations to win the support of the moderate Basque and Catalan nationalist parties. The resulting pact has again raised the question of whether Mr Aznar has any core politics beyond the pursuit of power.

WITH breath taking sang fro id, he has flipped over from an electoral campaign which played shamelessly on right wing Spanish resentment of minority nationalisms, to eulogising the unique cultural qualities most special to the Catalans and Basques.

More importantly, he has yielded to their economic demands to such an extent that, his critics say, his own central policy of meeting EU convergence criteria is now at risk.

The pact can be read as a great act of political imagination, albeit produced under duress. It has certainly shattered the traditional framework of Spanish politics which kept conservatism rigidly separate from regional nationalism, even when they shared right wing economic policies.

But it could also be seen as naked and shallow opportunism. In a scathing newspaper article, the novelist Antonio Gala wrote recently: "Aznar will do anything to get what he wants. One can only hope he won't do it over our dead bodies. He has already walked over his own."

This is almost certainly much too harsh a judgment. But the fact is that nobody, and possibly not even Mr Aznar, knows exactly what he is going to do now that he has climbed to the top of the political heap. The enigma of the ordinary man in the extraordinary position will only be resolved through his actual exercise of the power he has doggedly pursued.