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From James Naughtie...
I will remember the Madrid rain for a very long time. The morning after the bombings, when it began to pour and pour, we wondered if the advertised demonstrations that night would somehow fizzle out. But sometime in the late afternoon Madrid began to feel extraordinary. Rivulets of water were pouring down the pavements, and it was bitingly cold, but there began to be a quickening in the streets. People were all moving towards one of the main squares to join the march which was due to start at 7pm. We popped into a little church 鈥 San Pedro in Nuncio 鈥 which was packed for a six o clock Mass. You sensed then that a remarkable evening lay ahead. The church was quintessentially Spanish. I can鈥檛 think of anywhere in Europe where it would have been quite like this. It was dominated by a Moorish figure of Christ, black-skinned and richly-robed, surrounded by piles of red flowers, whose feet were being kissed by worshippers as they passed by. The air was heavy with incense; the Mass was said with passion; there was no music. Afterwards the worshippers mingled naturally with the people who were by now flocking in bigger and bigger bands to the point high in the city centre where the march was due to begin. By the time we had splashed our way there, we realised what was in store. As far as we could see there was a roof of umbrellas over the crowd, and it seemed to stretch for miles. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? It became clear that we might have to talk in millions. The scene was remarkable. Even in a country with a tradition of street demonstration that isn鈥檛 matched here at home, and with a passion for politics that is all the greater because democracy is less than 30 years old, this was bigger and more intense than we had expected. Some had come in families, or in small groups. Others stood alone. One man to whom we spoke had already given blood for the victims and had particularly poignant memories of having been in New York at the time of 9/11. He stood alone with his thoughts. Everyone spoke of 鈥渟olidarity鈥 with those who had been killed or injured.
Somewhere in that crowd were John Prescott, Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Silvio Berlusconi, Joschka Fischer and Romano Prodi and dozens of others from around Europe. Trying to see them, let alone to speak to them during the march, was going to be impossible. Normally that would have been the cause of acute journalistic frustration 鈥 and to make it worse our mobile phones kept packing up because the systems were overloaded and conked out 鈥 but somehow it seemed simply to be a reflection of the way things were. This was going to be a different kind of event : a show of defiance and of sympathy that would turn the bombings into an international tragedy. The pictures would mean that all across Europe, and in the United States, Madrid was the focus of attention.
And as we now know there were deep political undercurrents at work in that crowd. Though one of the regular chants we heard through the evening was "ETA 鈥 sons of bitches!" the suspicion was already growing that an Al Qaeda link had been brushed aside too easily by the government. It was 24 hours later that the interior minister made the announcement that there was a new claim of responsibility for the attacks from a group linked to Al Qaeda, and by that time, a few hours before the polling stations opened for the general election, there was enough opposition to the Government鈥檚 handling of the tragedy for politics to be turned on its head. A week before, the retiring Jose Maria Aznar鈥檚 Partido Popular was well ahead; now the opposition Socialists were steaming ahead.
I confess that the previous morning, when we were discussing the election on the programme, my own instinct had been that in these circumstances the government would probably benefit : tragedy produces an instinct to rally round. Unless, as seemed very unlikely, the Government was shown to have deliberately suppressed information about the terrorists, it would surely win. We were wrong. The speed of the turnaround reflected, surely, a lurking sense in the population that a straightforward blaming of ETA was too easy, and brought out the deep anxieties produced by Aznar鈥檚 decision to side with the Americans (and Tony Blair) in Iraq. That feeling was more volatile than we had realised. Of course, the truth about the bombings isn鈥檛 yet known, and it will probably be a long time before we know anything about the perpetrators for certain. But surely the story of Spain last week is that the politics of our time 鈥 dominated by war and terror 鈥 are impassioned and unpredictable. The human tragedies produced by those ten bombs on Thursday morning, and the wave of anger at the polling stations, were events that touched people far beyond Spain鈥檚 borders, and remind everyone how volatile our age has become. I鈥檓 afraid it is true that people were asking in Madrid last week : where next?
James
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