7

In 1996 the centre-right party PP (Partido Popular) came to power under the leadership of José María Aznar. The origins of this party, founded in 1976, were closely associated to the Francoist regime. The founder of the party had been a minister in Franco’s government and many of their members had links with the dictatorial regime. Aznar himself had been a member of a Catholic Falangist association when he was a university student, before joining the party. The year before becoming Prime Minister he was the target of a bomb planted by ETA. His armoured car saved his life.

7.1      ECONOMIC BOOM

The PP embraced the neoliberal economic ideas, prevalent in the US and Britain since the 1980s, based on deregulated markets, privatization of public companies, lowering of taxes and flexibilization of the labour market.

The mid-1990s was a period of international economic boom and Spain was one of the countries with a faster economic growth. During this period Spain became the country with the 9th largest GDP and the 6th biggest foreign investor in the world. For the first time in democratic times, unemployment fell, and by the end of Aznar’s mandate was down to 10.4%, a great achievement for Spain, although the figure was still higher that the average unemployment rate in the EU. The creation of new jobs was mainly due to the massive boom in construction that swept the country, fuelled by an increase in housing demand and a wide availability of credit for mortgages. Inevitably, the construction boom led to speculation. House prices increased exponentially every year and the construction bubble finally burst when the world financial crisis hit Spain at the end of the 2000s. The ‘brick fever’ (‘fiebre del ladrillo’), as it was labelled at the time, also created the perfect breeding ground for systematic corruption cases involving kickback payments from developers to regional and local authorities in exchange for bending the rules and facilitating lucrative construction projects.

Faithful to its neoliberal credentials, the PP government implemented a full privatisation of key state-owned companies, although the partial privatization of these companies had started with the previous Socialist government. The Aznar government completed the privatization of the telecommunications company Telefónica, the airline Iberia and the energy companies Repsol and Endesa. These newly privatised companies, except for Iberia, became big multinationals that started to invest abroad, especially in Latin American countries.

Alongside these privatised companies, other Spanish companies started to grow and operate internationally. Two of the most important banks in the world are Spanish: Grupo Santander and BBVA. The textile company Inditex, owner of the well-known fashion brand Zara, started its international venture at this time and has now thousands of stores located in the most expensive streets of the main cities around the world. Another successful case dating back to this period of economic growth is the construction firm Ferrovial, which operates four British airports including London Heathrow. It is also involved in the construction and maintenance of motorways all over the world.

7.2      IMMIGRATION

During the economic bonanza of the mid-1990s Spain became an attractive destination for migrants from all over the world, a sociological phenomenon that Spain had not experienced for centuries. In fact, Spain was better used to seeing its nationals leaving the country in search of work as it had happened in the 1960s.

According to the census of population, in the 1980s the number of foreign residents in Spain was around 200,000, roughly 0.6% of the total population at the time. By 2004, the end of Aznar’s government, the foreign population had reached 3 million (7% of the total population). This figure continued rising and peaked in 2011 with 5,700,000 foreign residents (12% of the total population), but by 2018 it decreased by nearly one million people due to the economic crisis hat hit Spain in 2010. The largest group of immigrants come from EU countries. By country, Moroccans are the largest group followed by Romanians. Colombians and Ecuadorians make up the largest numbers of Latin American immigrants. The jobs they perform in Spain are very different. In general, immigrants from poorer countries end up working in agriculture, construction, catering and as cleaners and carers. There is also a sizeable number of British citizens (near 250,000) who live in Spain, mainly on coast resorts. Many of them moved to Spain after retirement in search of a better climate, others work as English teachers or own businesses. Around 215,000 Chinese citizens are also resident in Spain. They specialize in retail and catering.

The issue of illegal immigrants, that is, people who are in the country without legal documents, has been a growing concern since the late 1990s. It’s difficult to give an accurate number of so-called ‘sin papeles’ (‘without documents’), but in the early 2000s the estimation was close to a million. Most of them reached Spain by conventional means of transport. Others, Maghrebis (North Africans) and Sub-Saharan people, risk their lives on dangerous sea crossings on inadequate boats or by attempting to get into Spanish territory climbing the fences that surround Ceuta and Melilla in the north of Africa.

In the last years, there has been an increase in arrivals from the Middle East, due to the political volatile situation in that area of the world. In these dramatic cases, the distinction between economic migrants and political refugees becomes fuzzier. In many of these cases human traffickers are involved, as it is the case with the trafficking of unsuspecting women for prostitution purposes and enslaved workers. Neither Spain nor the EU as a whole has come up with any efficient, fair and consistent policy to handle this problem.

During the PP’s mandate the Ley de Extranjería (Aliens Act) was reformed curtailing some of the rights given to migrants in a previous version of the law. Several harsher measures were introduced:

• Further restrictions for the entry of migrants.
• Tighter conditions for family members to join the migrants in Spain.
• Faster process of expulsion.
• Penalties for employers who hired illegal immigrants.
• Obligation on the part of transport companies to report unused return tickets and other passengers’ details.

The new Aliens Act encountered harsh criticism and protests by humanitarian associations and, finally, in 2003 the Constitutional Court ruled that the new regulations regarding expulsion were unconstitutional and that several other provisions in the Act were ‘possibly unconstitutional’.

The impact of immigrants on Spanish demographics, society and culture is clearly visible. In a short span of time Spain has turned into a country where a wide range of nationalities and races try to live together. Different languages are heard everywhere in the streets. Islam has become a visible religion in a country that had expelled its last followers four centuries before. This multicultural Spain is welcome by some, who see it as enriching, and rejected by others, who see it as a threat to the more uniform and traditional society they were used to live in. Spain, like many other countries, is attempting to deal with issues of integration and racism.

Immigrants have had a positive impact on the birth rate of the country, one of the lowest in the EU and in the world. Around 20% of children are now born to immigrant mothers. Despite this improvement, the ongoing decrease in the number of births in Spain is becoming a serious concern.

7.3        THE FIGHT AGAINST ETA

ETA’s attacks continued during this period, but the number of assassinations decreased considerably. Most of the victims were members of the police force and Basque politicians from the PP and the Socialist Party. A turning point in the history of ETA was the assassination of a young PP local counsellor in 1997. He was kidnapped by ETA, who demanded that Basque prisoners were transferred to prisons in the Basque Country. Two days later, when this demand was not attended to, he was shot. The cruelty of this action sprang mass protests against ETA all over Spain in a way no other assassination carried out by ETA had managed to do before.

Detentions of ETA members increased. The organization was getting weaker, but it still enjoyed a strong support in the left-wing nationalist strongholds in the Basque Country. The PP government changed its strategy against ETA and, with the help of the judiciary, embarked on a policy of arresting, charging and banning left-wing Basque civic organizations, political parties and newspapers that were sympathetic towards ETA and their goals. Some of those measures were controversial from the point of view of the right to freedom of expression and other democratic values. Two Basque newspapers and a radio station were closed down and their assets confiscated on account of alleged connections with ETA that have never been proven. The newspapers directors and other staff members were arrested and, in some cases, sentenced to prison. Allegations of torture under arrest, which were never investigated, were made by one of the detainees, the director of one of the newspapers. In 2002 the Parliament passed a law that banned political parties that did not condemned ETA. This law (Ley de Partidos) was directly aimed at the left-wing Basque nationalist party HB (Herri Batasuna), which used to get between 10% and 18% of the votes in the different Basque regional elections during the time the party was legal.

7.4      11-M: JIHADIST ATTACKS AND GOVERNMENT’S MANIPULATION OF INFORMATION

The US reaction to the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks did also have an impact on Spain. As a result of the attack against the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in 2001, the US launched a military campaign against Afghanistan, where the mastermind of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, was hidden according to US intelligence. Two years later the US and Britain decided to expand their ‘war on terror’ by attacking Iraq, alleging that President Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction, which were never found. Aznar, was eager to establish good relations with the US, and joined the then President, George W. Bush, and the then British PM, Tony Blair, on their military expedition against Iraq. Spain sent 2,600 troops in total. The invasion of Iraq was a very contentious issue at the time. The UN did not sanction this intervention and mass demonstrations took place in big cities in different countries, including Spain, against this military action. Nonetheless, the war plans went ahead.

In 2004 a general election was scheduled for March 14. Polls were indicating that the PP would win. On March 11 early in the morning several bombs exploded on four commuter trains in Madrid. The final toll was 191 dead, but nearly 2,000 people were left seriously injured and maimed. In the hours and days of total shock that followed, Aznar’s government repeatedly indicated that ETA were the most likely culprits, even if a few hours after the attack a van containing detonators and a tape with verses from the Quran had been found by the police. On the same day of the attack Aznar contacted the director of the newspaper El País to assure him that the following day he could publish that ETA had carried out the attack. Instructions were given to Spanish embassies around the world to maintain that ETA was to blame in their press statements, even if a jihadist group linked to al-Qaeda had already contacted a London newspaper to claim the attack.

The following day ETA contacted the media to announce that they had nothing to do with the bombs in Madrid. That evening mass demonstrations took place in Madrid and other Spanish cities to express people’s shock and disgust for the attack. On March 13 the government insisted on ETA as the most likely culprit and the mainstream Spanish media followed a similar line. That evening SMS messages where the government was accused of lying started to spread like wildfire. Three Moroccan and two Indian citizens were arrested as part of the investigations; however, the Spanish state-owned news agency was still considering ETA as the main suspect. In the evening before the election several rallies took place in front of the PP’s offices in different cities. The PP immediately accused the Socialist Party of being behind the text messages and the demonstrations. That evening a video tape where al-Qaeda claimed the attack became public and finally the Interior Minister was forced to officially announce that al-Qaeda were the perpetrators. The following day, March 14, the election took place and the Socialist Party won.

What happened during those three days was a blatant case of a government using its power and influence to manipulate information to its political advantage. The state-owned TV company was used as the main instrument to broadcast the government’s narrative at all times. Not only that, the night before the election, there was a sudden change in the programme schedule and a film about ETA was shown. Even if this was the main public TV channel in Spain, the film was not interrupted when the Interior Minister was due to announce that al-Qaeda had claimed the attack.

The PP knew that if the news about al-Qaeda’s responsibility in the massacre were confirmed before the election, they would risk losing it. The government had decided to intervene in Iraq against the wishes of many Spanish citizens, and since the bomb attack could be linked to this intervention, they were likely to be punished on election day. If, on the contrary, they could sustain the story of ETA’s responsibility, they were likely to win the election. Spain had not known any form of terrorism other than ETA’s before this attack and citizens were bound to rally around a government who had invested a great effort in its fight against the Basque organization.

The alleged perpetrators of the bomb attack were located nearly three weeks later. They blew themselves up in a flat in Madrid when the police were about to storm the premises. All of them died and so did a police officer.

Other people involved in the attack were arrested and tried in 2007. Two Moroccans and a Spaniard (an Asturian miner who had provided the explosives) were sentenced to the maximum prison sentence allowed by the Spanish legal system (40 years). Others were sentenced to much shorter sentences for their involvement. The verdict established that the attack was the responsibility of a jihadist group and that there were no connexions with ETA.

As things turned out the PP suffered a great loss of reputation and credibility, which was reflected in its losing the general election. The attack, known as 11-M, has gone down as one of the darkest hours in recent Spanish history.