“The fact is,” he says to his squire Sancho, “that I was born to be an example of misfortune, and the target and mark at which the arrows of adversity are aimed and directed.”
On Monday afternoon, Mr. Zapatero will walk into the Madrid legislature and dissolve parliament. After eight dramatic years in office, he is triggering an election, set for November 20, that will end his political career (he will not be running for re-election) and almost certainly give the right-wing opposition Popular Party (PP) a huge majority.
If Greece is the financial black hole of Europe’s economic crisis, Spain has become its centre of political symbolism. It must have been with an allegorical eye that Barcelona decided to hold its last-ever bullfight on Sunday, for the next day would mark a stark transition from the bullish buoyancy of the Zapatero era to a more bearish, austere period of anxiety and panic.
Mr. Zapatero, who has transformed Spain like no other leader since Franco’s demise, became transformed into Europe’s ultimate unwitting victim, a Quixotic figure whose lance has proven useless. » | Doug Sanders | Monday, September 26, 2011
