ANALYSIS: Aznar is playing politics in insisting that Eta was responsible for bombings, writes Paddy Woodworth
Even in the face of an appalling human tragedy, politicians continue to be politicians, and political agendas are still pursued. The extraordinary reluctance of Spanish government spokesmen and woman to consider, at least initially, any possibility that Eta was not involved in Thursday's bombings, and that al-Qaeda was, may not be unconnected to the fact that Spain goes to the polls tomorrow.
An open mind is perhaps the strongest weapon we have in confronting the entirely new situation which we may now call 11 marzo, or March 11, presents us. But open minds have not been much in evidence on any side in the highly politicised debate about the likely culprits. As late as yesterday morning, the Spanish Justice Minister, Ana Palacio, was insisting that it "crystal clear" that Eta was responsible.
On RTÉ around the same time, an MEP elected for Batasuna, the party linked by the Spanish government to Eta and banned last year, Koldo Gorostiaga, said that it was "completely impossible" that the Basque terrorists could have carried out the attack.
These are both highly political statements. The Spanish government knows that if the attacks are seen to be the work of Eta, the Spanish people are likely to give an absolute majority to the ruling centre-right Partido Popular (PP), which has always presented a tough and - up to now - apparently efficient anti-terrorist policy.
If the bombings were carried out by an Islamist group, however, then the huge gulf between the Spanish public and the Aznar government over the Iraq war is likely to reopen.
For radical supporters of Basque independence like Gorostiaga, however, Eta involvement in these attacks would be a political disaster. Eta's return to violence after the 1998/9 ceasefire has already cost radical nationalists 50 per cent of their support, and many who have remained loyal would totally reject Thursday's massacre.
Political parties in democracies like to assert that they do not play politics with terrorism, and that they operate a scrupulous bipartisan and consensual approach. However, in the election campaign so savagely interrupted by the bombing, Eta's terrorism had become a political football, with the PP confident that it could use it to score winning goals.
Their major league opponents, the Socialist Party (PSOE), has given unstinting support to Prime Minister José María Aznar's controversial policies aimed at defeating Eta, once and for all.
The Socialists actively supported Aznar's banning of Batasuna. They held firm during a judicial offensive against radical Basque media and social groups, which raised questions about the separation of powers between the government and judiciary.
It would be hard to ask more of any loyal opposition, but Aznar has always taken the position that those who are not 100 per cent with him are against him.
So, when the Socialists got most votes in the Catalan elections last November, and chose a pro-independence Catalan group as a coalition partner, the PP immediately began to cry foul. The PP regards the unity of Spain as sacred, and anyone who questions it is but one step away from terrorism.
When it emerged that this group's leader had secretly met Eta in France last January, Aznar demanded that the PSOE should expel his party from the regional government. For once, the Socialists were a little defiant, and while they dropped the offending leader as a minister, they accepted a replacement from his party.
In a deeply divisive election campaign, the PP has repeatedly warned Spanish voters that the PSOE is soft on terrorism, a tactic that became so excessive that it began to backfire, as opinion polls showed voters shying away from granting a party that sounded more and more arrogant another absolute majority.
Then the bombers struck in central Madrid, and all further party rallies were cancelled. Yet the government's rigid insistence that the perpetrators could only have been Eta can be seen as the continuance of the election campaign by other means, especially as more and more convincing evidence began to point to Islamic terrorists instead.
Yesterday, a highly respected journalist in El País, a newspaper close to the Socialists but with a very high reputation for accuracy, reported that Spanish military intelligence had indicated from immediately after the bombing that the most likely culprits were associates of Osama bin Laden.
Yet government spokespersons apparently ignored this advice, and persisted in pointing the finger at Eta, and only Eta, until material evidence became public that raised the profile of Islamic terrorists as the prime suspects.
Many politicians, in the PP as well as in the opposition, would find any use of Thursday's ghastly carnage as election material repugnant and obscene. But the government's judgment in the first 12 hours after the attack is at the very least questionable.
These questions have been compounded by the government's decision to impose what has been described as a political slogan, even a manipulative one, on last night's huge demonstrations of grief and anger.
The slogan "With the victims, with the constitution, and against terrorism" might seem innocuous to an innocent observer.
But the reality is that several Basque and Catalan parties, and sections of the Spanish left, regard the 25-year-old constitution as in need of major reform, and found it difficult to march behind such a banner, though in the end they did so in the interests of unity.
These are very early days after an unprecedented and terrible event. It is unlikely that suspicions that the PP has not played entirely straight with the public after these attacks will sink deep enough into the Spanish collective psyche to damage the party in tomorrow's elections. But as the fog raised by the bombings clears a little in the weeks ahead, those serious questions remain to be asked, and answered.
Paddy Woodworth is author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: Eta, the GAL and Spanish Democracy; (Yale, 2003)