THE GENERAL election results in Spain augur well for a stable and modernising future for a country which has in recent years seemed increasingly haunted by the many ghosts of the past and is still troubled by political killings in the present.
The victory of outgoing prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the Socialist Party (PSOE) is convincing. The militant and destabilising strategy of the conservative Partidio Popular (PP) opposition, which portrayed Zapatero as a traitor bent on the destruction of the Spanish nation-state, has failed to find sufficient traction to unseat him.
There are already welcome signs that the PP and its now-weakened leader Mariano Rajoy are quickly moving towards a more civil and rational style of debate, reducing the almost unbearable tensions that have marred Spanish parliamentary life over the last four years. It may be a good thing, too, that Zapatero's success falls short of an absolute majority. Previous Spanish governments with such majorities have succumbed to arrogance and ultimately hubris with tragic results.
In governing Spain for another term, Zapatero must take account of two contradictory realities and somehow work with both of them. One is that the deeply conservative, even reactionary, Spain represented by the PP can still win the loyalty of 10 million voters - within a million votes of his own party. Further reforms in education, social affairs, the structure of the Spanish state, or regarding the legacy of the Franco dictatorship, and any attempt to revive a peace process in the Basque Country will reignite the fears which the PP manipulated so powerfully during the last legislature.
However, there is also much support - though less militantly expressed - for precisely such reforms, among Zapatero's own voters, among Basque and Catalan nationalists and of course among the declining supporters of the more radical Spanish left. And the democratic deficit in the Basque Country, brutally exploited by Eta but exacerbated by the repeated banning of radical pro-independence parties, must be addressed.
The division of the country into two mutually hostile blocs is dangerous, with echoes of the "two Spains" that led to the civil war. Zapatero's new government must reach across this divide into the moderate centre-right which currently supports the PP. He needs to assure its citizens that his reforming zeal, while perhaps unpalatable to them, does not amount to revolution and is well within the bounds of normal 21st-century European democracy.
Meanwhile, the PP's duty, as a loyal opposition in a democracy, should be to oppose those reforms on a rational basis without recourse to the inflammatory language of the last four years. Intelligent leaders in the PP realise that those PSOE voters who share their doubts about the direction favoured by Zapatero are more likely to be convinced by argument than by demagoguery. Through such developments, based on the "dialogue with all groups" promised by Zapatero on election night, the Spanish centre could be steadied and legitimate demands for change could be met.