Posted on 03/18/2004 9:45:49 AM PST by quidnunc
Few election results are wholly unpredicted. Punditry is a trade that places a premium on being counter-cyclical. As soon as a consensus begins to emerge around a particular outcome, someone — often Mark Steyn — begins to forecast the opposite. If he is proved right, he can justifiably swank about it afterwards; and if not, no one much minds.
But if any commentators foresaw that the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) would win last Sunday’s election, they kept very quiet about it. The result took everyone by surprise — not just the journalists and politicians but the voters, too. In the 72 hours before polling day, I was unable to find a single person who expected José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the saturnine socialist leader, to form the next government. Believe me, it wasn’t for lack of asking. Spaniards are much easier to engage in conversation than Englishmen, since they do not avoid eye contact. I polled away like mad, in shopping queues and tapas bars, in buses and lifts. I even sampled a group of old ladies leaving Mass. Everyone said the same thing. The Partido Popular (PP) had been comfortably ahead even before Thursday’s atrocity; now it was a dead cert.
This conviction was especially deeply held on the Left. The day before the general election, I chatted to a group of socialist voters, members of a local taurine peña. They were not happy men. In fact, they were furious. They were bitter, of course, about the attack itself. They were angry, too, that four scheduled bullfights had been cancelled in its aftermath while the general election was going ahead. But what made them truly incandescent was the suspicion that the government was lying about the bomb.
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There was a paradox here. Ever since the Iraq war, the Left had claimed that the threat of Islamist terror had been exaggerated. Now they expected the suspicion of an Islamist bomb to help them at the polls. And, to Spain’s shame, it did.
There are more charitable ways of putting it, of course. One could say that 11-M served to remind Spaniards of how much they had resented the war. Or one could argue that what changed their minds was not so much the bomb as the suspicion of a government cover-up. But for at least some Spanish voters, I am afraid the late switch in voting intentions was pure cowardice. As a teenage girl told me on polling day, ‘When we supported the Americans, we made ourselves targets.’
It is always hard to explain what motivates voters. But consider two separate pieces of evidence. First, opinion polls in almost every country tend to register a ‘shy Tory’ factor: in other words, the raw findings overstate the support for the Left, because some people are ashamed of admitting that they vote for the Right. This time, though, PSOE outperformed all the exit polls. People were evidently reluctant to admit that they had changed their minds because of the bomb. Second, the Catalan politician who had controversially discussed with Eta the possibility of a truce in Catalonia saw his party increase its representation eightfold. It looks as though at least some Spaniards chose to vote for peace without honour.
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(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.co.uk ...
In the immortal words of Winston Churchill, "They have chosen dishonor. They will get war."
You forgot the French and Germans!!!
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