Ask any Spaniard for his or her opinion on the forthcoming election in Australia, and the response is invariably two-fold. The first is an earnest disavowal of any desire to meddle in, or even offer an opinion on the preferred outcome of any election held overseas. Far from the apathy characterising so many democracies across the world, Spaniards consider democracy as something akin to a sacred duty, having only again become a democracy in 1975 after decades of dictatorship.
In Spain there are no tabloid newspapers, no Herald Sun, no Daily Mail and no New York Post to sensationalise the issues. Instead, the future direction of the nation is taken very seriously. Although voting in Spanish elections is a voluntary process, voter turn-out is high—76 per cent at the most recent national election in March. Having had no control over the political destiny of their country for almost 40 years, Spaniards exercise their democratic rights with a sense of responsibility. At the same time, they hold fast to the principle that the only people who have the right to determine political outcomes are the inhabitants of the country in question.
It was thus with considerable dismay that Spaniards emerged from the grief of the terrorist bombings on 11 March to learn that they had been charged with the crime of appeasement for voting out a government barely three days after 191 people were killed. When Alexander Downer blundered into the fray during July with his attack on Spain and other countries for withdrawing their troops from Iraq, his comments simply reinforced the idea among Spaniards that their votes had been cast wisely. Indeed the ruling Socialist Party has, since being elected, grown ever more popular, something not possible if the election result had been solely a knee-jerk reaction to profoundly unsettling, but temporary events.
The second Spanish response to news that Australia is having an election is a genuine concern that the Spanish election result—coming so soon as it did after the bombings—does not encourage terrorists to seek a similar outcome elsewhere. Far from being blissfully unaware of the implications of Spain’s vote for change, many Spaniards freely acknowledge that terrorists could take confidence from their apparent ‘success’ in Madrid. However, they resolutely refuse to accept that the election result constituted an act of appeasement, pointing out that the terrorist cause has been aided far more by the invasion of Iraq