Spain at the beginning of the 21st century

The Aznar regime

The new prime minister, José María Aznar, like González, depended on the support of Basque and Catalan nationalists (he also secured the support of the small Canary Coalition party), requiring him to alter the party’s strident centralist rhetoric. Aznar’s focus on deficit reduction provoked a wave of strikes and protests, including demonstrations by government workers, a two-week strike by truck drivers, and, in 1998, violent protests by Asturian coal miners. Nevertheless, Aznar’s government reaped political benefits when Spain qualified to join the euro, the single currency of the European Union (in which the European Community [formerly EEC] was embedded in 1993); it did so by continuing many of the economic policies the Socialists had introduced to meet the Maastricht Treaty’s terms for inclusion. It also benefited from a recovery in the late 1990s that put the economy on generally firm footing as Spain entered the new millennium.

Aznar’s PP won a landslide election victory in April 2000, but it continued to face such intractable problems as the relationship between the regions and the state, Gibraltar’s status as a British colony, and the seemingly eternal scourge of Basque terrorism. International affairs caused domestic political tensions to flare in 2003, when Aznar supported the U.S.- and British-led war to oust Ṣaddām Ḥussein’s government in Iraq despite opposition by some 90 percent of Spain’s citizens (see Iraq War). On March 11, 2004, 10 bombs exploded on four trains in Madrid, killing some 200 people and injuring some 1,500 others in the worst terrorist incident in Europe since World War II. In elections held three days later, voters swept the governing PP from office in favour of the Socialist Party, led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

Zapatero and a new generation of Socialist leadership

Zapatero had campaigned on ending Spain’s participation in the Iraq War, a promise that he fulfilled immediately, though he also increased the number of Spanish troops serving in Afghanistan. Zapatero, who became prime minister at age 44, represented a new generation of Socialist leaders and brought a new type of progressive politics to government. Half his cabinet, including his deputy prime minister, were women, and his government passed a number of laws affecting private life—the most important of which were the legalization of same-sex marriage and the criminalization of domestic violence. Zapatero had long stressed the importance of the immigration issue for Spain, and his approach to it was very different from that of most other European governments; in 2005, for example, he implemented a program that enabled some 700,000 illegal immigrants to legalize their status. Zapatero also attempted to grapple with two long-standing issues: the status of Catalonia and of the Basque Country. He supported a reform of the autonomy statute for Catalonia in 2005 and the declaration, the following year, of that region as a nation. On the Basque question, Zapatero pledged not to yield to terrorism, though he hoped to arrive at a negotiated political solution with the Basque separatist organization ETA. The prospects for a settlement brightened in 2006 when ETA declared a “permanent” cease-fire, but it was broken off 14 months later.

Economic downturn

In March 2008 the PSOE triumphed again, in a hotly contested general election, although it failed to win an absolute majority; both the PSOE and the PP gained seats in the lower house of the Cortes (of which together they constituted 90 percent). Zapatero pledged to boost Spain’s slumping economy and to continue his agenda of social and political reform. Zapatero’s progressive policies had drawn criticism from conservatives and the Roman Catholic Church during his first term, and the PSOE’s win widened the division between Spain’s right and left.

The worldwide financial crisis that began later in 2008 contributed to the precipitous decline of Spain’s already ailing economy in 2009. Of all the members of the European Union, Spain was one of the worst-affected by the recession; by early 2010 the unemployment rate had surpassed 20 percent. The administration initially responded with a hefty economic stimulus package, but in mid-2010 it was forced to implement unpopular cost-cutting measures to curb the swelling budget deficit.

In September 2010 the government met a cease-fire announcement by ETA with skepticism. Zapatero reiterated that the Spanish government would not negotiate with the Basque separatist group unless it renounced violence forever and that political parties with links to ETA—e.g., Batasuna—would continue to be banned. On January 10, 2011, ETA declared a permanent, general, and verifiable cease-fire, and that October the group announced “the complete cessation of armed activity.” After nearly 850 deaths and a dozen broken cease-fires, the organization’s 40-year armed struggle for Basque independence had ended.