SPAIN: The main Spanish parties held their final rallies for tomorrow's local and regional elections in Madrid last night - a poll that is seen as crucial for both the main Spanish parties, the Partido Popular (PP) which currently governs both nationally and in the capital, and the Socialist Party (PSOE), writes Paddy Woodworth from Bilbao.
The PSOE, under the new leadership of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, desperately needs some major victories if it is to emerge from seven years' political purgatory.
Just before his final rally, the prime minister and PP leader, José María Aznar, announced tougher immigration laws, upstaging the PSOE on an issue not much debated in the campaign but which arouses strong populist feelings.
Despite the importance of the polls in Madrid and elsewhere, however, events in the Basque Country dominated the political scene yesterday. The elections are the first to be held since Batasuna, the Basque pro-independence party, linked to the terrorists of ETA by the Spanish parliament and courts, was banned.
Yesterday afternoon, the high-profile magistrate Baltasar Garzón ordered the arrest of five former Batasuna leaders, charging them with setting up another front for ETA. For 10 years, ETA has been killing local representatives of parties which oppose Basque nationalism. One of those arrested, Loren Arkotxa, was mayor of Ondarroa, a fishing port which until these elections, had a majority of Batasuna councillors.
Meanwhile, the Basque Nationalist Party, which dominates the Basque regional government, has said it will refuse to execute a Supreme Court order to dissolve Batasuna's parliamentary group. This could herald an explosive showdown between the Spanish judiciary and the most powerful and controversial regional parliament in the country.
There has been much speculation that Mr Aznar may take advantage of this clash to suspend Basque self-government, a move his supporters see as parallelled by Tony Blair's suspension of Stormont. However, the Basque government, in existence for 23 years, has much more extensive powers than Stormont. Any move to curtail it might only radicalise the situation further.
Ironically, the Basque Country is one of the few regions, along with Catalonia and Galicia, which do not re-elect their parliaments tomorrow, though city and town council elections will be held here, as throughout Spain. The Basque Nationalist Party's defiance of a Madrid court will probably strengthen it locally, and help it pick up votes from Batasuna supporters.
But the row will also help Mr Aznar nationally. He is seen by many Spaniards as the only leader tough enough to confront the fractious Basques, and he has referred repeatedly to the banning of Batasuna in his rallies. Yesterday's news will further increase his chances of fighting off the challenge from the PSOE.
The election campaign has been extraordinarily vitriolic, with the rhetoric sometimes recalling the 1930s.
National and even international issues, rather than street crime and the price of housing, have been to the fore. Indeed, an outsider attending most of the elections rallies could be forgiven for thinking that this was a referendum on Mr Aznar's deeply unpopular backing for the US-led war on Iraq.
The PP is also paying a price for Mr Aznar's hands-off approach to the catastrophic sinking of the oil tanker Prestige off the Galician coast last year. This issue has put a large hole below the waterline of the government's hard-won reputation for efficiency. Like the war, it has aroused strong feelings, expressed in huge demonstrations, which have boosted the electoral hopes of the PSOE, and Mr Zapatero. Mr Zapatero cultivates an informal image, which he hopes will contrast favourably with the more wooden style of Mr Aznar. Yet while Mr Aznar's charisma is invisible to those who do not support him, his appeal is still powerful to those who like a brusque, black-and-white approach to politics, and should not be underestimated.
While Mr Zapatero's instincts on most issues are more Blairite than leftist, he has not hesitated to use very aggressive language in this campaign, which may ultimately rebound against him. After the Casablanca bombing last weekend, where a Spanish social centre was attacked with serious casualties, he accused Mr Aznar of "putting Spain on the target list of international terrorism" by supporting the war against Iraq.
PP leaders were outraged by this interpretation. Even some of his own supporters regarded such specific linkage between the prime minister's policy and the deaths of Spanish citizens as reckless and inappropriate.
"He has lost the run of himself before losing the elections," Mr Aznar said.