one week before the election here in spain: the opinion poll en elpais said: 42% pp, 38, psoe. there wasn't too much difference if you believe in these numbers. anyhow it meant that psoe was getting more votes than in the years before and pp was loosing. the numbers happened to be right, just flip the parties.

there is a lot of speculation about the outcome. one point i am missing by reading foreign press is, in hindsight, someone can argue that no party but the pp and aznar handeled the situation in a way that brought within three days all those things to the surface that people disliked and critizised on them at least during the last 4 years. "basta ya" and "nunca más" wasn't invented after the assessination in madrid, but a long time before.

and by the way: after the manifestación people here said that they are going to vote to defend democracy. so for me the question is: what does democracy mean nowadays?

it would be hard to ignore the optimizm people are carrying into the streets today. strange to go to the paneria and hear flamenco music. normally there is no music at all.

even there are a lot of interpretations what flamenco music means to spaniards, i am pretty sure today, en la paneria, it had nothing in common with franco time but ... some sort of national pride.

tv publico gets a new director provisorial. the nervious behaviour at rtve didn't come out of the blue yesterday. there is a law from the 80s, that allows that and actually the critizism against rtve reporting only in favor of pp had already reached a high level over the last years: prestige, irak, the airplane crash, madrid, ...

so there will be a consejo that should discuss how to make out of this propaganda medium an independent one. lets see

y su propuesta de crear un consejo de reforma de los medios públicos, "tanto estatales como autonómicos", que trabajará "libremente" y que velará porque estén "al servicio de la ciudadanía". En ese sentido, explicó que, mientras el consejo de reforma "hace su tarea" nombrará un director general de RTVE "independiente" y que permanecerá en ese cargo "sólo hasta que el consejo de reforma diga cómo se elige".

the left from spain are somehow more influenced by latin america than by europe. just to get a little bit of lula into the eu can be interesting. and ya, he is not going into a coalition, but builds a minority government.

zapatero is just the fourth democratic elected president of spain. after the dictatorship of france that lasted until his death 75 came adolfo suárez, 1977, 82 felipe gonzález (psoe), 96 aznar, (who survived 95 an attentato by eta uninsured) and now zapatero.

what i didn't know until yesterday was that aznar was a tax inspector by training. (bbc)