The human suffering inflicted by the Madrid bombings, 10 years ago this week, is almost without parallel in the history of terrorist attacks in the EU. The political fallout has also been unprecedented, revealing exceptional depths of fear and loathing between Spain's major democratic parties.
The bombs killed 190 people on four rush-hour trains, and injured 2,000 more. Countless others were traumatised. All the victims were civilians; the primary aim of the perpetrators was clearly to kill large numbers of ordinary Spanish citizens. This fact alone made it most unlikely that the Basque terrorist group Eta was responsible. Eta had indeed often been cruelly careless with civilian lives as "collateral damage", but it did not kill at random.
Nevertheless, the conservative Partido Popular (PP) government immediately blamed Eta. Over the next hours and days, its leaders repeatedly dismissed mounting hard evidence, upheld by the police, that the bombers were Islamists. They may have had their reasons for this extraordinary stance. The PP's support for the recent Iraq war was deeply unpopular, even among its supporters. And a general election was just three days away.
If the bombers were Islamists, the PP might be punished at the polls for the attacks. But if it could persuade the electorate that Eta was to blame, then wavering centrist voters, fiercely opposed to Basque radicalism, would rally behind them. If this was their strategy, it boomeranged. Outraged at their government apparently playing politics with an appalling terrorist attack, the centre swung left, and the Socialist Party (PSOE) won an unexpected victory.
The PP then questioned the legitimacy of the new government. Worse, its senior figures actively fostered a byzantine, paranoid conspiracy theory that has taken deep root in Spanish society. They alleged unproven and unlikely links between Eta and Al Qaeda. Far more seriously, they also attempted to implicate the PSOE, the police and military intelligence with these two terrorist groups in a plot to steal a general election over the bodies of dozens of fellow citizens.
To entertain such an idea one would have to believe that Spain’s oldest party, and key state institutions, were corrupt and cynical beyond, well, belief. And indeed, the Spanish courts found only Islamists guilty, and no evidence whatsoever to support the conspiracy theory. For that theory’s diehard supporters, this verdict simply adds the judiciary to the list of institutions right-thinking Spaniards cannot trust.
The theory has taken root because it was elaborated not by a lunatic fringe, but by a phalanx of the country’s most influential conservative political and media figures. That indicates a sickness in the Spanish body politic that has still to be fully diagnosed, 10 years after the terrible events that revealed its presence. The victims deserved a lot better of their leaders.