Ruling Popular Party defeated in Spanish election
In a surprise result the governing party of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar won only 38% of the vote with the victorious Socialist Party taking 43%, with most of the votes now counted.
It is widely believed that the Spanish electorate felt the government, which was expected to win, had manipulated the release of information to the public in the wake of Thursday's bomb attacks in Madrid, by immediately claiming their certainty that Eta was responsible and initially discounting the possibility that al-Qa'ida could have been behind them.
It may be difficult to extrapolate the Spanish result to the US or to the UK, because it seems that the opposition to the war in Iraq was much greater in Spain even that it was in the UK. In the case of the US, it seems that feelings are more evenly split between those who broadly favoured the action taken and those who viscerally opposed it.
I suspect that this surprise result will have further repercussions which I hardly care to speculate about just yet, although I fear they will not be positive.
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