The Socialist Victory in Spain

It is hard to know what to make of the Socialist victory in Spain, and I think this is true for a few reasons. For one, it is virtually impossible to disaggregate the various causes for this electoral outcome. In particular, we cannot assess how much of a effect the recent bombing had. Nor is it clear what effect that would be. Polling before the bombing suggested Aznar's Populist Party would win re-election, but they did not. As Kevin Drum has pointed out, there seem three broad possibilities to explain this: 1) the Socialists would have won without the bombing. This still leaves many questions unanswered, not least whether the ruling party's support for the Iraq war was a primary cause of opposition. 2) The bombing itself caused a shift in support, largely because the electorate blamed the Populists for angering al-Qaeda by supporting the Iraq War. 3) The bombing itself did not shift support, but the Populist Party's seemingly opportunistic handling of the investigation (trying to pin the blame on ETA) angered a grieving nation.

I should think that the third explanation raises few interesting questions. It seems pretty straightforward that misuse of national tragedies for blatant political purposes is not a smart strategy in the days before of an election. All President Bush has to do is include video from 9/11 in his campaign ads and he gets a firestorm of criticism.

The second explanation just does not seem highly plausible to me. I don't see a larger number of Spaniards saying "they blew up a lot of people, let's stop fighting against them" than saying "now that they are coming after us, we really need the Populists in power." I'm sure there are some people who said both. But would there really be so many more of the former than the latter that it would change the election's outcome? Now I have to concede that Spanish popular opposition to the war was always extremely high, so perhaps I am underestimating how betrayed they felt by the present government. But if that were true, than I'm skeptical that the Populists would have won anyhow. That level of opposition to the Iraqi war, and blame on the Populists, would seem to me to suggest that the first explanation was just as likely as the second. What may have changed, however, is not individual voter's views. What may have changed, and what I consider the strongest support for the second explanation, is that voter turnout changed. Perhaps those who opposed the war and opposed the Populist Party felt like they had that much more reason to go the polls, now that al-Qaeda had struck home.

Let us say though, for argument's sake, that there are Spaniards who did follow the logic of "al-Qaeda attacked us because of the Populist Party's support for the war in Iraq, and thus I am going to vote for the Socialists." There were surely some such people, though it is impossible to know whether there were enough to have changed the results. Here the second major difficulty is presented. How do we interpret this position? Do we read it as cowardice, that they are simply afraid of terrorist attacks and will do anything to avoid them? That they are caving in to terrorists? That this is a victory for al-Qaeda?

I don't buy that. Opposition to the war was so strong, that surely these people are not saying "I supported the war and I supported the Populist Party before, but because of the bombing I do not." Instead, it seems more likely that their position was something like this: "I have always opposed our involvement in Iraq, but until now the costs have been sufficiently low that it was not a deciding factor in my voting preferences; that is no longer true, and I'm no longer willing to overlook a misguided policy now that it has cost so many lives."

This latter position seems pretty defensible to me. Terrorist attacks are a cost to be taken into account, just like the effect on domestic crime rates is taken into account when debating crime legislation. If the costs of the policy outweigh the benefits, it is easily opposed. For those Spaniards who never saw much benefit to the war in Iraq, it is pretty obvious that any large-scale terrorist attacks are too costly.

Just because some in America would weigh the costs and benefits differently does not mean that Spanish voters have done anything cowardly or irrational.

Of course, this is all speculation hampered by a very limited understanding of Spanish politics. Unfortunately, that is true of much of the blogosphere's commentary on this incident. I have no comprehension of the domestic political differences between the parties, nor their general foreign policy approaches. Thus trying to understand the Spanish electorate is highly speculative for me.

What I think I can do is try to identify with the Spanish voter on a more general, abstract level. How would such an attack effect my voting preferences? If I already felt that my country's policies were misguided, the fact that terrorists also thought my country's policies were misguided is not much of a reason to change my vote. However, if my pre-attack policy preferences were at least somewhat based on a view of terrorism that was altered by the attack, then perhaps those preferences should change as well. I think this is a key area where American and Europeans part ways. For us, 9/11 was a watershed moment, the first truly successful, devastating foreign terrorist attack on our soil. We see the "war on terrorism" as starting on that date, and most of us had little or no opinions on terrorism in our general foreign policy preferences. Thus, for many Americans "9/11 changed everything."

We take that attitude, and we project it onto Spaniards. We expect that they should have the same reaction to this bombing as we had to ours. Or at least some similarly visceral, world-view altering reaction. And yet Europe has had a much different experience with terrorism than has America. We did not experience the IRA, the Red Brigades, ETA, etc. We had Patty Hearst. So even here, on this abstract level, I think it difficult as a young American to understand how this bombing appears to the average Spaniard.