SPAIN: You might expect that Spain's political landscape would now be totally dominated by the need to respond effectively to the terrorist attacks on Madrid which took place a week ago today. The reality, however, is rather different, writes Paddy Woodworth
The incoming prime minister, Mr José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is focusing almost as much on his domestic agenda as he is on international terrorism and foreign affairs. So is the Spanish media.
Yesterday he found time to announce that he would set up a new housing ministry as soon as he takes office, in an effort to curb rising prices and speculation, and expand a chronically inadequate rental sector.
This proposal will not delight free market purists, but in fact there is a broad consensus, which includes the centre-right Partido Popular (PP) which he has just defeated, that more subsidies and state protection are urgently required to tackle Spain's housing crisis.
In other key policy areas, however, there is no consensus at all, and Mr Zapatero's Socialist Party (PSOE) government will have to unstitch several of the PP's most tightly woven plans, and take bold new initiatives, if he is to implement his election programme.
At the moment, the signs are that he intends to do so and quickly.
The greatest challenge, and, perhaps not accidentally, the one where his thinking is least clear-cut, lies in the relationship of Spain's minority nationalities - the Catalans, Basques and Galicians - to the central government.
This issue is of course, in the Basque case, also related to the terrorism of Eta.
The PP, which has a very strong traditionalist attachment to the idea of Spanish unity, was fiercely resistant to any deep change in the structure of the Spanish state.
The conservatives felt that the devolution of power to Spain's 17 autonomous regional governments, which is indeed already quite exceptional in European terms, had reached its absolute limit.
One step further, they said, and the "indissoluble unity" of the Spanish state will be at risk.
It is almost impossible to overstate the depth of feeling this question arouses on every side of this debate.
During their eight years in power, the PP was very skilful in linking the idea of Spanish unity, which was an obsession of General Franco's dictatorship, with the idea of democracy itself.
Eta's terrorist campaign is clearly both anti-democratic and morally repugnant to the vast majority of Spanish citizens. But it was, ironically, very useful to the PP in forging the public perception that "separatist" proposals were a threat to core democratic values.
The next step in the PP's strategy was to define Spain's 1978 constitution as the last word on both the structure of the Spanish state and the form of Spanish democracy.
The PP borrowed the term "constitutional patriotism" from the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and proclaimed this ungainly hybrid as the touchstone of a true Spanish political creed.
Basque and Catalan nationalists, and some groups on the Spanish left, argued that every constitution is a child of its time, and should be open to revision and reform.
Such arguments were denounced as little better than apologies for terrorism in Madrid.
The fact that the 1978 document was drafted under the exception pressure of a transition from dictatorship, with ultra-right generals rattling sabres off stage, gives this argument particular force in Spain.
Under the terrible pressure of Eta's continuing killings, however, which hit both PSOE and PP local councillors, as well as academics and journalists sympathetic to both parties, the PP persuaded the Socialist Party to at least acquiesce in its constitutional crusade.
This was especially true after the September 11th attacks. There followed a judicial offensive which banned Batasuna, Eta's political wing, and a series of other radical Basque groups and media, and put a severe strain on the independence of Spain's judges.
The democratic Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) responded by a defiant proposal for self-determination, which in turn led to an unprecedented confrontation between the central and Basque governments. All this happened with hardly any debate, led alone opposition, from the PSOE, which began to seem a prisoner of PP policies. But when Aznar extended his anti-terrorist ideology to include the war on Iraq, it was a bridge too far for the PSOE, and the cross-party consensus cracked wide open.
Following this, the Socialists have gone into coalition with a republican pro-independence group in Catalonia, and have begun to repair their once-healthy relations with Basque nationalism.
Now they have a unique opportunity to take broad new initiatives which might create a new framework for Spain's complex jigsaw of nationalities. The signs just a few days after the PSOE's victory are that they are going to do so.
The change is the country's political atmosphere over the last few days is palpable. Subjects which were taboo are now back on the table. In this strangest and most tragic of political honeymoon periods, everything suddenly seems possible.
Mr Zapatero has spoken of calling a convention of autonomous prime ministers. His likely deputy, Mr Jesús Caldera, said dialogue, a word regarded as akin to treason by the PP, will be the hallmark of relations with the Basques, though in the same interview he repeated the PSOE's flat rejection of the PNV's self-determination programme.
There are also rumours that Eta is about to call a ceasefire. Certainly, many of their supporters now believe violence is totally counter-productive politically, and more so in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings.
Ironically, Spain's gruesome first encounter with full-scale Islamic terrorism might influence its home-grown terrorists to desist at last.
Negotiating with Eta is very difficult for any Spanish government, but if the group did definitively say farewell to arms, it could reasonably hope for a flexible and imaginative response from this new government.
The future shape of the state is the biggest domestic issue facing Mr Zapatero.