Had drinks with an actual Spanish person the night of Zapatero's win a few years back. I remember attempting to explain that Spain was about to become an even greater "enemy" than France to the lizardbrains, and that conservatives would claim that Spain was "surrendering to terrorists." Which of course happened. The truth was that people were pissed that the Aznar government lied to them, putting the blame on ETA when they knew it wasn't true. They even used state TV to help them:
Voters said they were enraged not only by the government's insistence that the Basque separatist group ETA was responsible, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, but they also resented its clumsy attempts to quell antigovernment sentiment.
For example, the main television channel TVE, which is state-owned, showed scant and selective scenes of antigovernment demonstrations on Saturday night, just as it ran very little coverage of the large demonstrations against the war in Iraq last year. It also suddenly changed its regular programming to air a documentary on the horrors of ETA.