WORLDVIEW:FOUR YEARS ago, a lacklustre and apparently predictable Spanish election campaign was brutally blown wide open by the Madrid train bombings, which claimed 198 lives just 72 hours before polling opened.
The latest bitter and unpredictable election battle, which ends tomorrow, shows that the irreconcilable differences provoked by the then government's response to those bombings have revived the 1930s spectre of "two Spains", a society so divided that its two big parties sound more like mortal enemies than political opponents as they approach polling day. And, at the last moment, Eta's killing yesterday of a Socialist Party member in the Basque country was a grim reminder that domestic terrorism still looms large in Spanish politics. In 2004, the conservative Partido Popular (PP) had looked set to win a third term in office, under a new leader, Mariano Rajoy. He appeared to be a safe pair of hands and also a less divisive figure than his predecessor, José María Aznar.
The opposition Socialist Party (PSOE) was led by a young newcomer, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. His fresh, decent image was regaining some ground for a party damaged by the legacy of corruption and dirty war scandals left by Felipe González's governments of the 1980s and 1990s. But no one expected Zapatero to overtake the PP so early in his career.
The bombings changed everything. The electorate's horror at the massacre quickly turned to anger against a government that played politics with terrorism while the victims' blood was still on the train tracks. The PP insistently blamed Eta for the attacks, while all the evidence suggested Islamists were responsible. In a word, they lied.
The party thought pointing the finger at Eta would unite Spanish voters, who are hostile to the Basque movement, behind the government. And they feared that admitting Islamist involvement would have reminded the public that the PP had supported Bush's invasion of Iraq, an adventure deeply unpopular even with conservative supporters.
"The people deserve a government that tells them the truth," a PSOE leader declared. And the people decided overnight, that they wanted a government led by Zapatero.
Rajoy and the PP have never digested that defeat, and have mounted a vitriolic opposition to the PSOE that has repeatedly violated the norms of democratic debate.
A mystery used to linger over Spain's relatively peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1970s. Where did the hard right disappear to after Franco died? Rajoy's strategy has convinced many observers that it has been hiding in the PP all along. The party has wrapped itself in a nationalist flag and revived the rhetoric of "national Catholicism", echoing the incendiary civil war language of the 1930s.
At first, more moderate conservatives in the party thought that Rajoy was leading his party into a cul-de-sac. The conventional wisdom is that no contemporary Spanish party can win an election without the votes of the centre. Tomorrow, however, Rajoy has a real chance of winning, though opinion polls still give the PSOE a fairly clear lead over the PP of 42 per cent to 38 per cent.
Zapatero's vulnerability is puzzling at first sight. He withdrew troops from Iraq, a popular decision. He seemed to be a new leader for new times, a kind of Obama after the long bad years of González (read Clinton) and Aznar (read Bush). His well-intentioned desire to complete the modernisation of Spain, however, opened a Pandora's box. Rajoy launched massive street protests in response, which the right had not been able to do since the dictatorship ended.
Zapatero has behaved with a curious innocence throughout his first term.
It is as though he does not quite grasp that the price of the transition to democracy included a "pact of forgetfulness" about crimes committed by the dictatorship. And he violated an unwritten law that family values, the role of the Catholic Church in education and, above all, Spain's unity, were not open to change, even by a democratic majority.
So he plunged ahead with a series of innovative measures: introducing gay marriage, secular educational reforms, immigration reforms and renegotiating the place of Catalonia within Spain. And he gave overdue recognition to victims of the Franco regime. All these issues were red rags to the PP's increasingly aggressive bull.
However, Zapatero's attempt to launch a peace process in the Basque country gave Rajoy his most effective lever. Accusing him of "betraying the dead", Rajoy succeeded in showing that Zapatero lacked the courage of his own convictions. The process became paralysed and then collapsed, aided and abetted by Eta's criminal intransigence.
If the PSOE holds on to power, Zapatero may yet consolidate his reforms and draw the PP, under new leadership, back from hard right to centre-right and democratic dialogue. But if Rajoy can bring him down now, the next four years could be a fraught and nasty exercise in turning back the Spanish clock.