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HYSTERICAL BLINDNESS
Joseph Robertson | 15 March 2004

Why it is cowardly to suggest that voters lose their right to choose when terrorists attack...

Since the bombings that struck at the heart of Madrid last Thursday, there has been a lot of talk about whether terrorism could sway an election. Now that Zapatero has come out on top of Rajoy, or rather, the PSOE has defeated the PP, and a new prime minister and a new government is slated to take over, observers have wasted no time in calling it a victory for terrorists.

There is something inherently malicious about this opinion, at least in this case, because there are a number of circumstances which indicate why the election resulted in a change in government. First of all, turnout was up 8.46% over 2000. The Spanish response to the attacks was anything but fear: it was an overwhelming declaration of national solidarity and of opposition to violence, manifest in a nationwide total of 12 million citizens standing together in the streets to condemn terror in all its forms.

This mass public gathering may have awakened a sense of urgency in the Spanish people about their election, but it was more likely a sense of civic pride and a feeling about the moral obligation to participate in the elections, to reinforce Spain's democratic process, that led to this higher turnout.

Second, Spain is tragically all too familiar with the rigors of terror and the grief of its aftermath. Opposition to terrorism in Spain is such that in 1996, when a single man was killed by ETA, for political reasons, 5 million Spaniards marched silently, in cities across the country, with the Madrid procession led by competing political leaders from the national government. Spain knows terror, and knows how to combat it, and has long taken great pains to ensure security and peace within its borders.

So it is outrageous to suggest that this incident, while far worse than any before it, would somehow turn Spain to a nation of cowards. Spain has long been tested, and its people are committed to fighting terror. No Spanish party's election would be a victory for terrorists. The one party that was tied to a regional terror group, was banned last year by the government. Terrorists have no allies in Spanish politics, plain and simple.

Also: from the very first moment, the ruling party siezed every opportunity to blame ETA, the Basque separatist group, for the bombing. Spain has many decades of experience with ETA bombs, so it was not at first difficult to assume that ETA was behind the attacks. But when the evidence began to point to an Islamist group, the PP government continued to state unequivocally that only ETA was behind the attacks. By now, it seemed dubious that so much certainty could exist when none of the public evidence pointed to ETA.

By Saturday, the public had heard statements to the effect that the bombings "had all the hallmarks of an ETA attack". In fact, they did not, and the Spanish people, due to their unfortunate and lengthy experience with ETA's tactics, were aware of this. ETA normally sends warning; there was none. They target individuals and political targets, never random civilian crowds. They always claim responsibility; they denied it here.

Needless to say, the claim that "all the hallmarks of ETA" were evident registered as a false declaration. Again, people took to the streets. There were mass demonstrations again on Saturday, though not as large as Friday. Some were similar in tone, protesting terrorism, declaring solidarity, calling for peace and security.

But a rally also sprung up outside the headquarters of the governing party, and outside the investigative HQ. These demonstrators, numbering in the thousands, or tens of thousands, wanted answers. They were motivated by a fear that their election would be swayed by the attacks. They were afraid that the governing party would cover up the true origin of the attacks, for political convenience.

90% of the Spanish population had opposed its government's involvement in the Iraq war, but its leaders had been perhaps more cavalier than any other nation's in their support. They never even took their case to the elected delegates of the country's congress. If the attacks were linked to Al Qaeda, or to any group that sought to punish the Spanish people for Iraq, the PP feared it would cause an electoral backlash, so they fought to keep that interpretation of events out of the national press for as long as possible. This was not lost on the Spanish people; there were anecdotal reports of individual voters choosing not to support the PP, though they had done so in the past.

To make matters worse, the PP candidate, Rajoy, declared the demonstrations "illegal"; the response around the country, but primarily among those calling for the facts to come out, was that the people's voice is not illegal. It was a monumental blunder for the PP to have been so aggressive in its attempts to shape public perception of the attacks. It appears to have led to the widespread perception that for the governing party, this was strictly politics, even as the nation was grieving. Again, this appears to have fueled the desire of individual Spaniards to participate in the democratic process, to make sure that in the one way they could, they would play a role in determining the nature and the policies of their government.

In the end, Spain chose to hold its elections, because it did not want the nature or the rhythm of its democracy to be dictated by terrorists. This was an act of defiance to terror, not cowardice, not complicity after the fact. Spain's people chose to turn out in soaring numbers, almost 80%. Polls that had shown the PP leading by 5 to 7 points before the attacks had not accounted for increased turnout.

In the American election of 2000, polls showed George W. Bush with a significant lead in the week leading up to the vote, as high as 10 points according to some sources. This was a massive polling error, as he would actually receive 0.5% fewer votes than Al Gore, when the people actually voted. There was no attack, no obvious event or scandal to change the outcome; the polls were simply wrong; the people voted their conscience.

In the case of Spain, it seems more likely that it was the civic sentiment, and the sense of national pride in having a democratic process, which led Spaniards to voice their opposition to terror by voting in higher numbers, roughly 80% turnout. The panic-stricken political pundits who now say this election was a clear victory for terrorists are pushing an insidious and dangerous lie on everyone who hears them. They are pushing the position that a nation can only say no to terrorism and express its faith in and allegiance to democracy by voting in an incumbent government.

It is amazing how quickly these observers are willing to throw logic out the window, in order to argue that democracy is best expressed by a forced perpetuation of a government, based solely on the decision of terrorists to choose a date close to an election. No single argument could be more contrary to the spirit of democracy as such. Democracy is never expressed automatically by the election of one candidate or another. Democracy is expressed, is real, when people are able to make a choice for themselves, when a nation is able to stand up and declare its own direction, from the bottom up.

That is how democracy works, and it worked in Spain. There may have been political miscalculations by the governing party, but that is their prerogative, just as it is the prerogative of the voter to judge the worthiness of a party by its miscalculations. It is difficult to determine, however, in what way precisely proponents of the theory that terrorists win when governments change (regardless of timing) are actually supporting democracy with their argument.

The nature of a democracy is that no circumstance, no political power-play, no forced hand, can be allowed to interfere with or to overturn the will of the voters. The Spanish people are not entirely detached, when it comes to politics: they have allegiances, visceral and intellectual, and they vote their conscience. As in any political system, it is up to the parties to make their case for worthiness to govern. It should be held up as a model of strength and commitment to the democratic process that this (and not "electability") was the standard by which Spain's population chose its government, even in the midst of such unprecedented trauma.