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T he November 20, 2011, elections confirmed what by now appears to be a rule in Spanish democracy, namely that alternation of government is more the result of the failures of the governing parties than of the ability of the opposition to present alternative plans that appeal to the electorate. This is what happened in 1982 when Felipe González’s Socialists were voted in to replace Adolfo Suárez’s Union of the Democratic Center (UCD), which by then was in decline and in pieces; and in 1996 when the Socialist Party (PSOE), exhausted and undermined by scandals, was replaced by José María Aznar’s Popular Party (PP). The same thing took place when Aznar was defeated in 2004 and then Zapatero in 2011, both caused by the poor handling, from a political and communications point of view, of events that had hit Spain from outside (the Islamist terrorist attacks in Madrid’s Atocha train station and the eruption of the economic and financial crisis, respectively). It will suffice here to recall that Aznar and his minister of the interior had held back from pursuing the Islamic fundamentalist line of investigation into who was responsible for the attacks, in order to avoid paying an electoral price for Spain’s involvement in the war in Iraq, instead stubbornly blaming the Basque terrorist group ETA (Basque Homeland and Freedom) for the massacre (Botti 2004a, b; Montero et al. 2008; Sampedro 2008) and that Zapatero, as late as the end of June 2008, in a long interview given to the newspaper El País , had considered it “questionable” to use the term “crisis” when faced with alarming statistics from all of the economic indicators. 1 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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