The Madrid Attacks and the Election of 2004
On March 11, 2004, at 7:35 am, ten explosions ripped through four commuter trains in Madrid. The blasts killed 191 people and wounded 1,841. Seven of the key suspects died in the attacks and 21 people, mostly Moroccans, were later convicted of involvement. In a videotaped message, a spokesperson for Al-Qaeda later took credit for the attacks. Hours after they were carried out, police found a van with detonators and a cassette tape with verses from the Koran at a train station through which all of the trains had passed.
News of the Madrid tragedy was broken first by Spanish radio and TV stations broadcasting live, including the BBC and CNN. Local stations including Telediario 1, Telediario 2, Antena 3, and Informativos Telecinco 1 also covered the attacks live. Headlines the next day included “Terrorist Hell” (El País) and “The political response should be different depending on the identity of the perpetrators of the attacks” (El Mundo).
To understand the context in which a major terrorist attack in Madrid influenced an election between the days of March 11 and March 14, 2004, it is important to explain the political tensions that existed in Spain. This section will examine how erroneous political messaging from the ruling party, seen by many as working in concert with sections of the media, contributed to the government losing an election in the wake of a terrorist attack. The impact of this was a massive contribution to an already growing loss of faith by the Spanish public in their existing political and media institutions.
President José María Aznar’s People’s Party (PP) had won elections over the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) in 1996 by a small margin but was re-elected in 2000 with an absolute majority. It returned to power largely because of its liberalizing economic policy, a pledge to fight terrorism committed by the Basque armed group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), and a promise to defend Spanish unity against political secessionist movements in the Basque country.
The government, however, began to lose support with the Spanish electorate halfway through its second term due to unpopular labor reforms and its handling of the sinking of the Prestige oil tanker, 250 kilometers off the coast of Spain.15 The country’s worst environmental disaster contaminated thousands of kilometers of beaches. More provocative was the government’s decision to support the US-led war in Iraq. According to one poll, more than 80 percent of Spaniards over the age of 18 were against Spanish intervention.16
One key election promise of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of the PSOE was that he would withdraw the 1,300 Spanish troops in Iraq. While the war was unpopular with the electorate, it is important to recall that Spaniards had not been isolationists in conflicts past. Spain supported the first Gulf war in 1991, the intervention in Bosnia, and the wars in both Kosovo and Afghanistan.17 The war in Iraq was viewed, instead, as Aznar’s support for US President George W. Bush’s international agenda.
It was in the wake of such political discontent that Al-Qaeda terrorists targeted Madrid’s trains on March 11, 2004, during the morning rush hour. The bombings, occasionally referred to in shorthand as “11-M,” were the worst terrorist attacks in Spanish history.
Immediately after the bombings, sections of the media and the government pointed blame at ETA. The group had carried out numerous attacks in Spain over recent decades, causing around 817 deaths since 1968. ETA sources denied any connection with the bombing, but the discovery of a plot to bomb Madrid’s other main railway station the previous Christmas Eve, as well as the arrest of two ETA members on February 28 while transporting 500 kilograms of explosives in a city south of Madrid, cultivated this interpretation.
On March 11, just a few hours after the attacks, Prime Minister Aznar called a number of newspaper editors to tell them of his conviction that ETA was responsible for the attack.18 One former editor who spoke with me for this research paper said the call was brief, and Aznar assured him the government had evidence of ETA’s role. “When the Prime Minister tells you that he has proof of ETA’s involvement, you are inclined to believe what he says,” said the editor. A press conference delivered the same day by the Minister of the Interior also implicated ETA. That afternoon, the Foreign Minister sent a note to Spanish embassies worldwide, asking ambassadors to lay the blame with ETA. Several Spanish reporters who covered the Madrid bombings told me the government sought to prove ETA’s involvement as an attempt to curb criticism over Spain’s role in Iraq. The government called on people to march across Spain the next evening with banners bearing the same slogan: “With the victims, with the Constitution, and for the defeat of terrorism.”
“Spain in 2004 had a wide choice of media,” said José García-Montalvo, Professor of Economics at Pompeu Fabra University, in an interview. “There were all types of private TV stations, public television, and the internet as well. People usually felt there was an incredible amount of information about most world events. But after the bombs exploded, there was no other information available. It all depended on rumors and leaks and contradiction. The government tried to project the idea of ETA being behind the attacks, but we had not had before a terrorist attack of this size. We felt the explanation was not truthful.”
In 2004, before the advent of social media, Spaniards communicated primarily through Short Message Service (SMS) and turned to print newspapers and desktop websites for information. The Spanish media reacted quickly to the tragedy with special editions. Newspapers published on the day of the attacks ran headlines such as “Massacre in Madrid. ETA murders more than 130 people,” “Murderers. Profound shock in Spain after the savage attacks by ETA in Madrid” and “Murder by ETA in Madrid.”19 Some newspapers like El País made paid-for Web sections free of charge. Others, like El Mundo, changed their websites to text only to allow for faster updates on slow internet connections. During March 2004, “atentado Madrid” (attack Madrid) was the third-most-searched term in Google Spain.20
Yet from the outset, responses from other figures in government and sections of the media began to raise the suspicion that other terrorist groups could be involved in the attack. The government’s case against ETA was called into doubt when the Minister of the Interior gave a press conference to announce the discovery of a stolen van with seven detonators and a Koran tutorial tape. The PP’s foreign affairs spokesperson, Gustavo de Arístegui, later suggested the van may have been the work of the PP’s enemies. Leaks from security forces also questioned the credibility of the ETA theory.
By the next day, March 12, the Spanish media was divided in its editorials. In a report called “Fear or Falsehood? Framing the 3/11 Terrorist Attacks in Madrid and Electoral Accountability,” author José Olmeda examined the leading Spanish newspapers of March 12. The conservative daily ABC accepted ETA’s authorship of the attacks and praised the PP’s counter-terrorist policies. El Mundo, however, was more critical: Its editorial cited a BBC report on a joint venture between ETA and Al-Qaeda, but said blame was as yet undetermined. Barcelona’s La Vanguardia said that if Al-Qaeda were found to be responsible, it would be a “punishment for supporting the Iraq war.” The left-wing newspaper El País went further by drawing attention to “the eventuality of it being a job by Al-Qaeda and that had to do with the role played by Aznar’s government in the Iraq war.” The newspaper also speculated whether there existed a policy of concealment or manipulation by the government.
The next forty-eight hours would provide ordinary Spaniards a number of opportunities to voice their dissatisfaction. That evening, an estimated eleven million Spaniards took to the streets across the country to voice their grief and fury.21 They had organized through both SMS and appeals from opposition parties. In Madrid, they chanted, “No to terrorism!” and “Assassins! Assassins!” One banner read, “We were all on that train.” While there has never been any evidence that sections of the media colluded with politicians to protect Aznar’s government, the leading television channel TVE, owned by the state, showed few scenes from the anti-government demonstrations. A year earlier, it had given minimal coverage to the marches against the Iraq war.
The following evening, thousands gathered outside the PP offices in Madrid and in a dozen other cities in protests organized by phone calls and SMS. For several hours, demonstrators held banners saying, “Before the voting we want the truth.” Spaniards awoke the next morning, the day of the election, to learn that an Al-Qaeda spokesperson in Europe had claimed responsibility for the attack in a video message and police had arrested three Moroccans and two Indians in connection with the attacks.
Although the PP held a steady lead in the weeks before the bombings, its margin of victory had also begun to shrink. Yet, according to final opinion polls published on March 7, the PP was still expected to win a slim victory with 42 percent of the vote, while the PSOE share was projected to be 38 percent.22 Few expected what followed. The PSOE won 42.5 percent of the vote against the PP’s 37.6 percent.
My interviews with Spanish policy experts and journalists led me to three conclusions about the legacy of the bombings. First, in taking responsibility for the attacks, Al-Qaeda was specific in its aim to punish Spain for its role in the “War on Terror” and manipulate the election. An Al-Qaeda spokesman said: “We declare our responsibility for what happened in Madrid exactly two-and-a-half years after the attacks on New York and Washington. This is an answer to the crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. If your injustices do not stop there will be more if God wills it.” This was partly achieved on April 14, when, a month after winning the election, Zapatero ordered the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq.23 The last Spanish troops left Iraq in May 2008. One result of Spain’s departure was the shift from a pro-US foreign policy to a more pro-European footing on both security and trade.
Second, the years since the bombings have seen seismic changes in Spanish politics and the media. The public’s dissatisfaction with its existing institutions has been widespread. While the events of 2004 are not exclusively to blame, both media and political responses to the Madrid bombings quickened the decline in trust.
In the media, companies which began as family businesses have seen waves of consolidation and restructuring since 2008. The majority of Spain’s ten media conglomerates are now controlled by corporations or financial institutions. The Spanish media has also witnessed a decade of contractions. In 2013, El País laid off 129 employees and cut salaries by 8 percent. As Spaniards have become increasingly aware that their press is influenced by powerful financial and economic groups, trust in the media has fallen. In interviews for this paper, a number of Spanish journalists pointed to the media’s partisan approach to the Madrid bombings as one factor.
Spending cuts to regional public service channels have also eroded public faith. In one poll, 77 percent of Spanish journalists said their independence was poor or very poor; 50 percent reported being pressured to change their stories. A handful of new online publications less beholden to the traditional business media model—eldiario.es, public.es—have gained loyal readerships but struggled to establish financial security.
Third, the public’s distrust with politicians is also visible. The response to Madrid can be viewed as part of a sequential chain of events exacerbated by a 2008 housing collapse, cuts to public services, and unemployment figures of around 21 percent. Frustration at the two main political parties showed last December when the ruling conservative party, PP, lost its majority, and, only two years after it was founded, the new anti-austerity party Podemos24 came third in the general election.
“The protests against the Iraq war were a formative moment,” said Sebastiaan Faber, director of the Oberlin Center for Language and Cultures, in an interview. “There has been a mobilization of cultural life with activists, movie directors, authors, actors, and ordinary people vocalizing their dissatisfaction with government. You can draw a line between the Iraq protests, the election of 2004, and the anti-austerity protests of 2011.”