Frankly, GigaShadow, I\'d think that I know better what happened than you do.
Everything is much more complex than you think; I\'ll give you the details, so you can judge for yourself what happened.
The main thing that you have to understand, is that in the last four years our government, has been completely ignoring us after they got a full majority in the past elections.
Apart from many other things (that I\'m not going to list here, but caused a lot of social conflict), they unilaterally decided to support Iraq invasion, despite the fact that more than 90% of the population was against it and there were demonstrations with millions of spaniards in the streets.
Then, last week, AQ attacked four trains full of passengers, most of them students and workers, with the result of more than +200 dead, and +1,500 wounded.
Most people were sad or angry about the attacks, but nothing else. We\'ve been living with terrorist attacks for more than 30 years, and have first hand experience with how terrorists work.
I think that if they had said AQ was responsible for the attacks from the start, and that they were going to do their best to fight against them, most people in Spain would have understood; PP would have lost some votes, but they would have gained some as well from the people who was angry about the attacks; the same thing happened to Bush, and he gained popularity.
But they didn\'t.
The last four days previous to the elections, they were trying to hide information from the citizens about AQ\'s involvement in the terrorist attack (including amazing levels of media manipulation, in fear that it could affect their re-election in some way.
When the details about AQs involvement were leaked into the public opinion a few hours after the attacks, all their strategy backfired, but they kept lying; a lot of spaniards took that as a disrespect for those who had died in the attacks .
Despite that, most people didn\'t change their vote; PP lost about a million voters from the last elections (most of them, before the attacks actually happened), which would have been enough to win this time as well. What changed with the attacks and the following manipulation, is that they gave a reason to vote to a lot of the people who usually don\'t give a damn about elections (mainly young people, who was already fed up with their despotic government).
That new blood the government lies brought into the equation, is what gave the PSOE enough votes to win, not because we feared being attacked. We had already been attacked and knew that we\'re going to be part of AQ\'s list of objectives for years, no matter what. We knew that from the moment our government supported the war, and that didn\'t change last year\'s elections (the PP won).
It\'s not different than if Bush were kicked out of the White House after he lied about the mass destruction weapons. It\'s matter of respect.
