By AFP
Madrid : Spain ended its election campaign early after a former politician from the ruling Socialist Party was shot and killed Friday in the northern Basque region in an attack blamed on the separatist group ETA.
Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, tipped to win a second mandate in Sunday’s vote, immediately accused ETA of seeking to upset the electoral process. “The terrorists wanted to interfere today in the peaceful manifestation of the will of the people at the ballot box,” he said in a televised address. “But Spanish democracy has demonstrated that it does not allow challenges from those who oppose its basic principles and its most essential values.”
Zapatero came to power in a surprise election win in March 2004 amid the shock of train bombings in Madrid by Islamic extremists that killed 191 people just three days earlier. Isaias Carrasco, a former town councillor and member of the Socialist Party, was shot in the Basque town of Mondragon at around 1:30 pm (1230 GMT), and died shortly afterwards, the Basque interior ministry said.
Witnesses quoted by Spanish media said he was shot several times at close range in front of his wife and daughter outside his home. The shooting came two weeks after the government raised its terror alert level to maximum, fearing an ETA attack to coincide with the election. “ETA assassinated Isaias Carrasco in Mondragon,” Spain’s Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said. “It is a vile act by a gang of assassins.”
The head of the Basque regional government, Juan Jose Ibarretxe, also condemned the killing, saying the Basque people “are fed up with ETA violence.” Both Spain’s main parties immediately announced an end to campaigning, which had been due to end at midnight anyway. Political, business and union leaders also met in the Congress of Deputies and issued a statement condemning the attack and calling for “united front against terrorism.”
Both Zapatero and the leader of the conservative opposition Popular Party, Mariano Rajoy, visited Mondragon to meet with the victim’s family. ETA, considered a terrorist organization by the European Union and the United States, has killed more than 800 people in Spain in its nearly 40-year campaign for an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain and parts of southwestern France. It had called on Basques to boycott the general election, in which national security was already a key issue after the opposition accused the government of being soft on terrorism by negotiating with ETA.
In statement read on television Friday, Rajoy called on the country to “be united against ETA,” which should now lose “all hope of achieving its political objectives.” Four years ago, Rajoy had been the overwhelming favorite to defeat Zapatero and lead a third consecutive conservative government.
But the Socialist leader won support from voters infuriated over the Popular Party’s insistence ETA was to blame for the Madrid train bombings even though evidence pointed to Islamic extremists angered by Spain’s role in the Iraq war. It was not immediately clear what effect Friday’s attack might have on the election outcome. “There will be some effect for one side or the other,” said the head of the Sigma polling institute, Carlos Malo de Molina. He said it could lead to “frustration and therefore damage the government, but on the other hand the victim was Socialist and people will sympathise with him.”
Zapatero, who has brought in popular liberal reforms such as same-sex marriage and fast-track divorce, was the favorite to win on Sunday. But the Socialists fear a low turnout could hand the election to the conservatives, and have focused their campaign on mobilizing their supporters. The opposition has accused the government of mismanaging the economy, which is suffering a slowdown following a construction-led boom, and vowed to take a hard line on immigration if elected.
Zapatero launched a dialogue with ETA in June 2006, three months after it declared a “permanent” ceasefire, but the talks ended when the organisation staged a bomb attack that killed two people at the car park at Madrid’s airport in December of that year. ETA officially called off its ceasefire in June 2007, since when the authorities have adopted a hard line, arresting dozens of members of the group and its banned political wing Batasuna.