"THE moment of change has arrived," Jose Maria Aznar, the right wing contender for the Spanish presidency told a packed rally in Madrid's Sports Palace late last night. "This is the moment of normal democracy, of the alternation of power.
Meanwhile, Felipe Gonzalez Socialist President of Spain for the last 13 years closed his own campaign in his native Seville. His powerful voice close to breaking point, he made a passionate final appeal to "stop the advance of the right".
The previous night in Barcelona, he had shamelessly appealed to the romantic instincts of the Spanish left, while attempting to link Aznar's Partido Popular (PP) to Francoism. "No Pasaran," he had chanted, using the old slogan of Spanish republicans when they pledged them selves to stop the fascist armies from taking Madrid during the civil war.
His rhetoric got prolonged roars of applause from 45,000 Socialist Party (PSOU) supporters. But it smacked of desperation. The Fascists did eventually take Madrid and the PP will almost certainly take more seats than the PSOE in tomorrow's general election.
Further down the Mediterranean coast in Valencia, the PP leader, Jose Maria Aznar had been telling 55,000 supporters that he had an answer for Gonzalez's rhetoric.
They (the PSOE) wanted "to reinvent a history of ghosts which we have overcome. They speak of fear and rancour, of a Spain which does not exist to a Spain which does not believe them."
In fact, even socialist voters privately accept that a victory for the right would not be any kind of regression to the bad old days of Franco. It would be more a measure of the democratic maturity of the new Spain.
Links with the destructive politics of the civil war will only be broken when governments can alternate from left to right (or vice versa) without the other side suggesting that a catastrophe is at hand. Add to this the reality that 3 years of socialist rule have created a legacy of corruption that cries out for renewal by another party, and the case for Aznar begins to look very strong indeed.
The memory of 40 years' dictatorship, however, means that the fear that the PP is really the old, authoritarian right in new clothes is widespread and understandable.
There are far right elements in the PP, but a glance at the composition of this unusual party suggests something more complex than mere nostalgia for the past. (What the PP will make of the future is an open question.)
The PP grew out of a straightforward party of the right, Alianza Popular, founded in 1976 and led by a formidable and deeply authoritarian former Francoist minister, Manuel Fraga. Several name changes later, Fraga seemed to make a breakthrough in 1982, surging from nine to 106 seats. But the socialists had twice as many, and they belonged to the future, Fraga to the past.
In 1989, the party was "refounded" as the PP. Fraga quickly made way for a new leader, Jose Maria Aznar. The latter's famous lack of charisma has probably actually been an advantage. It is hard to cast this man, who sometimes looks like Charlie Chaplin playing Hitler, as a dangerous fascist caudillo.
Aznar has the right background to satisfy supporters of the old regime (his grandfather was an eminent Francoist journalist) but he is also too young, at 43, to be tainted, from a democratic point of view, by service to the dictator.
In Aznar has gradually succeeded shifting the focus of the PP from the right to the centre, without losing old supporters along the road. He has learned lessons from both the initial success and the later collapse of Adolfo Suarez's Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD), which won the first two post Franco democratic elections.
Aznar sharply narrowed the gap with the Socialists in 1993, and overtook them in subsequent European, local and regional elections. Opinion polls give him a consistent nine point lead in this campaign.
Five distinct political "families" now make up the PP, ranging from a minority of unabashed Francoists to left wing Christian Democrats, but Aznar is firmly in control. His problems will begin if he does not gain an overall majority tomorrow.
He cannot conceivably coalesce with the communist led Izquierda Unida but it will not be easy to do a deal with either Basque or Catalan nationalists, given the strongly "centralist" tradition of all PP factions. If the figures are right a small regional party in the Canaries, Coalicion Canaria, could offer the most painless path to power.
AFP add: The Spanish electoral commission has ordered the conservative newspaper ABC to run a front page correction of a front page story that forecast a landslide centre right victory on the basis of what the daily admitted was a non existent public opinion poll.
The newspaper has so far resisted three orders from the electoral commission to run the correction on its front page.