Analysis: Government attempts to suppress al-Qaeda links were extraordinary, writes Paddy Woodworth.
The thin veneer of democratic unity against terrorism, which the outgoing Spanish government and the main opposition party maintained for three days after the Madrid bombings, finally fractured yesterday, just as Spain was going to the polls
Irish listeners had a chance to hear just how bad things had got in an extraordinary debate on RTÉ's Sunday Show.
A candidate for the opposition Socialist Party (PSOE), Miguel Martínez, not only baldly accused the governing Partido Popular of denying the public the right to know the truth about who was behind the bombings. He went on to say that if the PP did not get an absolute majority yesterday, "something strange might happen".
Exactly what he meant was not clear, but Gustavo de Aristegui, the highly articulate PP chairman of the Spanish parliament's foreign affairs committee, leapt in to express outrage that one democratic party would accuse another of nefarious intentions on election day.
Under tough questioning from Tom McGurk, he continued with a rational-sounding defence of the government's decision to keep insisting that the finger of blame for the bombs pointed at Eta, while almost everyone else, including the Spanish intelligence services, thought the evidence pointed much more clearly to al-Qaeda.
There is still, just about, a case to be made on both sides. There is no-one better equipped to make the case against Eta that de Aristegui, a Basque who has himself been a target of terrorism from this direction. But what de Aristegui glossed over, rather shamelessly, was the quite extraordinary way in which the Spanish government appears to have attempted to suppress - a less serious word is hardly appropriate - information that supported the al-Qaeda argument, at least until election day was over.
The rationale for this may be speculative, but it seems fairly obvious. As the Italian newspaper La Stampa pointed out as early as last Friday, if the public believe Eta is the culprit, the PP vote is likely to increase. Whereas if al-Qaeda is thought to be responsible, the electorate might punish the PP for its highly unpopular support for the US-British invasion of Iraq.
The government's strategy was clear from the first press conference after the bombing.
The Interior Minister, Angel Acebes, not only insisted Eta was guilty of the massacre, he said pointedly that anyone who suggested otherwise was "un miserable" - a vile or despicable person.
Yet eight hours later hard evidence became public that pointed to al-Qaeda, and Acebes had to grit his teeth and acknowledge just such a suggestion as valid.
It takes a brave media to question a government's judgement in the immediate aftermath of such carnage, and large sections of the Spanish media, especially television, is notoriously subservient to the government line on all issues anyway. The only EU country with more supine television channels is Berlusconi's Italy.
Between Acebes's two press conferences on Thursday, the Foreign Minister, Ana Palacio, issued a note to the entire Spanish diplomatic corps instructing them to use every opportunity to put forward the view that Eta was the prime suspect. Spain's UN representative duly held out, against advice from its own allies and a sympathetic world, that Eta's culpability should be definitively written into a UN resolution.
Every government has a perfect right to direct its own diplomats, though less dogmatic orders would surely have been appropriate in a confused and fluid situation.
What is much more serious is an allegation yesterday, in an editorial in El País, that the prime minister himself phoned senior media editors to give them his personal word that Eta was almost certainly the guilty party. El País is certainly sympathetic to the opposition PSOE, but it is a newspaper with a good track record.
How these editors were supposed to respond, when they received persistent leaks from reliable sources that Spanish military intelligence was giving precisely the opposite advice, is not clear.
In fact, those media which are generally hostile to the PP have behaved very responsibly through this crisis, publishing articles pointing to al-Qaeda but giving the government the benefit of the huge and growing doubts about its handling of information about the tragedy, until the evidence of manipulation grew so compelling that it made its way, cautiously, into more critical articles.
It now seems that the government did not stop at trying to spin its national media, but also put pressure on foreign correspondents.
"The government's behaviour has been unacceptable," said Steven Adolf of Dutch national radio. Adolf is president of a Madrid foreign correspondents association, though he was speaking in an individual capacity. The government flatly denied his allegations, but a number of other correspondents fully endorsed them.
As these stories began to percolate into the public domain, the enormous anger and grief Spanish people feel about the attacks began to find a new target, closer to home than the probable attackers.
A government election office was burned on Saturday night in the Galician region, and demonstrations demanding the truth spread all over Spain.
These demonstrations arguably violated the spirit of Spain's "day of reflection" before an election. But these are exceptional circumstances.
One of the demonstrators said: "Why should we stay silent, when Spanish TV is still speaking on the government's behalf today?" Regardless of yesterday's result the political situation in Spain is going to be extremely volatile in the weeks ahead.
Paddy Woodworth is author of 'Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy (Yale, 2003)