WikiLeaks cables: Spanish socialist government plans to renege on election pledges

[Joanne98]

Cables from the US Madrid Embassy published on WikiLeaks shows that José Luis Zapatero’s Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) did not expect to win the March 14, 2004 election, in which it pledged to withdraw troops from Iraq and opposed the previous Popular Party (PP) government’s economic policies. Within hours of coming to power, the PSOE was seeking to renege on its manifesto pledges.

The cables confirm the analysis made by the World Socialist Web Site that the PSOE was the undeserved beneficiary of the hostility to José María Alfredo Aznar’s PP government. It was elected as a result of a surge of popular anger over the PP’s lies, which sought to blame the Basque separatist ETA for the March 11, 2004 terror bombs in Madrid and conceal evidence linking Islamist groups to the atrocity.

The PP did so out of a well-founded fear that the truth would become a focus for the overwhelming opposition to Aznar’s support for the US-led war of aggression against Iraq, and a more general opposition to the government’s right wing economic and social agenda. Opinion polls at the time regularly showed that more than 90 percent of the population was opposed to Spain’s participation in the Iraq occupation. Millions took part in demonstrations across the country.

But the election win created major problems for the PSOE, which was committed to carrying out the bidding of big business under conditions where the majority of Spaniards were demanding a major shift in economic, social and foreign policy to the left.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/spai-d24.shtml

[xchrom]

1. The kind of info that makes an informed voter. Nt

[Warren Stupidity]

2. This is why wikileaks must be shut down.

We cannot have informed citizens. It will ruin EVERYTHING.