WASHINGTON, July 4 (UPI) -- Last week the Spanish press carried pictures from Istanbul of the first meeting between President George W. Bush and Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero since the socialist leader's landslide victory in the Spanish elections. After some initial awkwardness, the reports said, it was "George" and "Jose Luis."
Their meeting at the NATO summit was the first glimmer of a promise that the tension between Washington and Madrid is easing. On his first day in office in April Zapatero had announced that he was bringing home Spanish troops that his predecessor Jose Maria Aznar had committed to serve in Iraq, and the Bush administration had gone (more or less quietly) ballistic.
"Spain will get nothing from us, nothing," a Republican legislator had hissed to a Western diplomat as the Spanish units were withdrawn the following month. Later, at a gathering of top Spanish industrialists in Madrid the U.S. ambassador in Spain George Argyros, a California real estate businessman, publicly urged Finance Minister Pedro Solbes: "Tell Zapatero and (Defense Minister Jose) Bono to stop bashing the United States."
But the Bush administration is now on a correction course to repair its war-damaged relations with Europe. At the same time the most recent phase of bashing the United States is receding in Europe. At the NATO summit Zapatero helped matters by promising to double the number of Spanish troops in Afghanistan to slightly more than 1,000, and offering to send about 100 military police to Haiti. The Spanish prime minister has also named Carlos Westendorp, a senior diplomat well known to the Americans to be his man in Washington. Westendorp is a former foreign minister and later the senior civilian administrator in Bosnia.
In Spain, any improvement in U.S.-Spanish relations is perceived as another Zapatero success. Sworn in on April 15, the tall, lanky, low-key politician is still basking in the warmth of a more than seven out of 10 approval rate, according to a leading Madrid pollster and political scientist Julian Santamaria. "The scores are even higher among young people and women and he has grown very much within his own party," Santamaria told United Press International Sunday.
Not surprisingly, a grateful Spanish Socialist and Workers Party 36th annual conference this weekend confirmed Zap -- as he is familiarly known -- as Secretary General (party leader) by a vote of over 95 percent.
The move away from Aznar's total commitment to Washington was, of course, deliberate. It was coupled with a return to closer ties with Spain's neighbors and other EU members alienated by the Aznar government -- and not just because of differences over Iraq.
Zapatero, for example, dropped Aznar's opposition to voting rules in the new European constitution that had been one of the obstacles to gaining overall approval of the document. The old voting rules had given Spain and Poland almost as many votes as France and Germany despite the former countries' smaller populations, and the voting formula in the constitution rectifies that imbalance.
Domestically, he was lucky enough to find the economy improving, with unemployment dropping; and he has been sensible enough not to tamper with its progress. The market developed an attack of the jitters immediately following his election after almost a decade of conservative, business oriented government. But the appointment of Solbes, a highly respected banker as finance minister soon steadied nerves in the financial world.
The March 11 train bombings three days before the elections traumatized Spain, and particularly the capital. But the wedding in June of Crown Prince Felipe, the heir to the Spanish throne, to television newscaster Letizia Ortiz lifted the mood and added a nice egalitarian touch to the political developments. As a divorced, single professional woman in her 30s, Letizia Ortiz is very much a modern Spanish woman. As a group they tend to vote socialist.
If Zapatero has shown no inclination to tamper with the Spanish economy he is, however, changing the social landscape. His cabinet is gender balanced, comprising eight women and eight men -- a first in Spanish politics. The deputy prime minister, the second most important cabinet post, is held by a woman, Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega. The government has launched a tough offensive against domestic abuse, a prevalent problem that has been ignored for years. By next January the Socialists expect to have passed legislation recognizing gay marriages in Spain. There are also plans to broaden the rules allowing abortions, and to speed up legal procedures for getting a divorce.
Some of these measures have created tension between Zapatero and Spain's conservative Roman Catholic hierarchy. But an editorial Friday in the newspaper El Pais which supports the socialist government but is not known for going out on a limb argued, "Homosexual marriage is an urgent demand for that part of Spanish society which, owing to its sexual orientation, feels itself discriminated against in its civil rights, and which demands legal protection equivalent to that of other citizens."
On the Islamic terrorist front, the socialist government set out to prove that it was in no way "beholden" for its electoral victory to the al-Qaida linked militants who carried out the Madrid train bombings by going after the terrorists with a vengeance. Several Moroccans allegedly implicated in the attack blew themselves up in an apartment building when they were cornered by security forces. Others are facing trial in Madrid, including the man accused of planning the operation. He was captured in Italy last month and handed over to the Spanish authorities.
Meanwhile, the conservative Popular Party, which in the view of observers had initially reacted to defeat in the March elections with bad grace has "regained its serenity" -- as one senior Spanish official put it Saturday -- and a "logical balance" has returned to Spanish politics. "The best for Spain is to have a government with a working majority, but nothing overwhelming, and a strong, responsible opposition," the official said. "The PP is still being a little too aggressive, but they will settle down."
One reason for this change of mood is the withdrawal from the political limelight of Jose Maria Aznar who in his second term was considerably more popular in Washington than in Spain. This has given his more moderate successor Mariano Rajoy more room to maneuver in reviving the fortunes of the party. The second is the PP's strong showing in the June European Parliament elections. Although the polls had predicted another devastating defeat, the government ended up ahead by one seat.
"Another crushing blow would have created havoc in the opposition," the official said. "And the one thing that still makes us uneasy is political havoc."
