The Spanish prime minister, endorsed with a comfortable majority yesterday, is serious about renewing society and politics , writes Paddy Woodworth
The Spanish parliament yesterday gave José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero a comfortable majority as Prime Minister, a month after the March 14th general election gave his Socialist Party (PSOE) an unexpected lead over the governing Partido Popular (PP).
The PSOE's victory still left it 12 votes shy of an absolute majority, but the result was a foregone conclusion. The PP had alienated all other opposition parties by shifting from the centre to the right on many issues since it won an absolute majority in 2000.
The only question yesterday and on Thursday - the investiture debate lasts two days - was which parties would actually vote for Zapatero, who had not sought any coalition partners, and which would abstain.
In the event, the Socialist Party leader romped home with 183 votes, seven more than he needed, with the support of nationalist, leftist and regional parties.
Most attention had focused on the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), a radical party which has been catapulted into prominence from historical obscurity over the last year.
The ERC opposes the monarchy and supports Catalan independence, and its leader has held private talks with the Basque group ETA, branded as tantamount to negotiating with terrorists by the PP and by powerful sections of the PSOE itself.
Nevertheless, the Catalan electorate increased its representation in Madrid from one seat to eight, making it the fourth-largest group in the Spanish parliament.
The ERC's parliamentary leader, Joan Puigcerdós, made it clear on Thursday that his votes would go to Zapatero, after the PSOE leader committed himself to promoting the Catalan language in the EU.
Indeed, the new atmosphere in the Spanish Congress was exemplified in his speech, which recalled the alliances between the PSOE and the ERC in the heady days of the 1930s Second Republic and spoke openly of the Francoist antecedents of the PP and of his party's commitment to the creation of a Catalan state through peaceful means.
Spanish is the only language of the Madrid parliament, and when Puigcerdós opened his remarks in Catalan, the PSOE speaker humorously upbraided him in the same language.
This gesture would have been inconceivable under the PP which, as Zapatero put it in his friendly reply, had never understood that "a state with many languages has great riches".
Zapatero expressed the hope, however, that "a plural Spain" might persuade the ERC to "resist the temptation of independence".
With those votes under his belt, Zapatero could engage in a confident exchange with the former communists of the United Left (IU). Many of its traditional voters switched to the PSOE on election day, after the trauma of the March 11th bombings and the PP's controversial mishandling of information about them, to ensure the defeat of the outgoing government.
Aware of this debt, he waited until this point in the debate, just after midnight yesterday morning, to reiterate his controversial promise to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq before June 30th, unless a satisfactory UN mandate is agreed.
With the IU's five votes pledged, Zapatero was effectively already elected when the debate reopened yesterday morning. But he went on to garner six more votes from Canary Islands and Galician nationalists and Aragonese regionalists.
However, the centre-right Catalan coalition CiU abstained, appearing more radical than ERC in alleging that Zapatero would only concede "cosmetic" reforms to the region's autonomy statute.
The abstention of all 10 Basque nationalist deputies, from three parties, may be a more serious challenge to Zapatero, representing a continuation of the dangerous rift which opened up between them and Madrid under the PP.
Zapatero wants them to withdraw proposals for a referendum on self-determination, while they want him to withdraw from a contentious anti-terrorist pact with the PP.
The shift in style even had an effect on the very civil debate with the defeated prime ministerial candidate of the PP, Mariano Rajoy.
But in defending his 141 votes against Zapatero's investiture, Rajoy asked tough questions and accused the PSOE leader of substituting good intentions for a political programme at a time of severe crisis.
Zapatero's repeated allusions to dialogue, he said, were "the sign of a weak and unstable government". He accused him of vagueness on practically every issue, but in a lively session of point and counterpoint the new Prime Minister was quite specific on some matters and pulled no punches on others.
Given that a large majority of Spaniards were opposed to the war in Iraq from the outset (and therefore long before the Madrid bombings), Zapatero was on strong ground domestically when he said he would "take Spain out of that photograph in the Azores".
(The reference is to the pre-war summit between President Bush, Tony Blair and Rajoy's predecessor in the PP leadership, José María Aznar).
Perhaps the biggest indication of the new Prime Minister's seriousness in renewing Spanish society and politics can be found in the composition of his cabinet. For the first time, half of the ministers are women.