Spain: Prime Minister Zapatero lashes out at European Central Bank

Saturday, July 5, 2008 :The right-wing of Spains Popular Party (PP) has rejected the turn to the centre endorsed at the June 20-22 party conference in Valencia. A significant and influential section of the party, grouped around president of the Madrid region, Esperanza Aguirre, and backed by former PP Prime Minister José Maria Aznar, has launched a struggle to undermine the decision and unseat Mariano Rajoy who was re-elected PP leader by conference delegates.

The conservative paper El Mundo described the period leading up to the conference as the darkest 100 days in Popular Party history.

The turn to the centrean attempt to focus attacks on government economic incompetencehas been orchestrated by sections of the PP led by Rajoy, the partys founder and former Francoist minister, Manuel Fraga, and the founder of El Mundo, Pedro José Ramírez, who turned against the partys four-year long campaign of confrontation with the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE). They are focusing on softening their far-right image, whilst urging business leaders that only the PP can lead a frontal assault on the social conditions of the working class.

The PP initiated a full-frontal and overtly rightist offensive against the PSOE, together with the Vatican and sections of the military officer caste, soon after the Aznar government was brought down in March 2004 due to popular hostility to its support for the war in Iraq and neo-liberal economic policies. The new PSOE government was denounced as illegitimate, the product of a leftist coup, and repeated provocations were launched to unseat it from power. However, the campaign backfired and only served to galvanise popular hostility to the PP, alienate many of its own supporters and assist the PSOEs re-election earlier this year.

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