Profile | Zapatero, from spotless Spanish leader to former prime minister under suspicion
He is the first former head of government to be formally accused after leaving office with an unblemished record
La Moncloa, the seat of government in Spain, seems to carry a curse. Ever since Adolfo Suárez decided in 1976 to establish the headquarters of the first democratic government in 40 years at La Moncloa Palace, no prime minister has left it without calamity or disgrace.
Suárez himself was forced to resign amid rumblings of a military coup; Leopoldo Calvo‑Sotelo departed after an electoral defeat for the political‑science textbooks; Felipe González, besieged by an unmatched string of scandals; José María Aznar, marked by the disgrace over his lies over the 2004 Madrid train bombings; José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, battered by an economic crisis he failed to foresee and that ultimately pushed him to betray his own programme; Mariano Rajoy, ousted by a no‑confidence vote and a damning corruption ruling…
The corruption that clings to Spanish democracy like an inseparable shadow has played a decisive role in the misfortune of almost all of them. It now threatens to blow apart Pedro Sánchez’s mandate. The Spanish prime minister is already the second‑longest resident of La Moncloa after González. Even the great totem of the transition to democracy, Juan Carlos I — the head of state who played a crucial role in restoring democracy after the Franco dictatorship — has ended up with his image in tatters because of his passion for filthy lucre.
Zapatero had escaped that stain. The former leader of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) could boast of being the only prime minister who, after two terms in La Moncloa Palace, had not faced any significant scandal. Neither among his inner circle, nor in his party, nor anything else that concerned him. But in the end, he hasn’t escaped that fate — even if 15 years had to pass after he left office. The first prime minister since the dissolution of the Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD) to depart without even a hint of suspicion will also be the first former prime minister to testify before a judge as a defendant for allegedly murky dealings. Something that González, Aznar, and Rajoy never had to do despite facing major scandals.
Zapatero’s political career has unfolded like a gallop from surprise to surprise. No one expected that, leading a group of second‑tier MPs, he could win that PSOE congress in July 2000 by just nine votes, where he stirred the audience’s fervour with a simple phrase: “We’re not doing that badly!” Nor could almost anyone foresee the popular reaction on March 14, 2004, against Aznar’s delusional determination to deceive an entire country about the worst massacre since the Civil War. It was this wave of indignation and enthusiasm that swept the discreet lawyer from the Spanish city of León into power.
The right never forgave him. Some set in motion the infamous conspiracy theory, a poison whose stench still seeps through certain drains of Spanish politics today. Those sectors, in a permanent state of rage, caricatured him as a radical leftist — a portrait hardly compatible with an economic policy that could not have been more orthodoxly liberal, summed up in one of his lines: “Cutting taxes is left‑wing.”
He raised his progressive banners along other paths — what would later be coined as identity politics. He inspired as much enthusiasm as resentment with the legalization of same‑sex marriage, a suite of feminist measures, and by recovering the memory of the defeated in the Civil War. His most recalcitrant detractors have never even acknowledged his greatest contribution to Spanish democracy: negotiating the surrender of the Basque terror group ETA. On the contrary, they accused him of being the one who surrendered and of betraying the dead.
For all the noise made by those trying to paint Zapatero with Machiavellian traits, the image that stuck was the nickname attributed to Alfonso Guerra’s eternal sarcasm: Bambi. ZP, the politician of soft, almost gentle manners, which he himself summed up in the word talante. A politician who, in opposition, endlessly offered state pacts, and who, once in power, dared to admonish Hugo Chávez at an Ibero‑American Summit for attacking someone as distant from him as Aznar.
Yet that kindly face also offered critics another side: a naïve, well‑meaning president, filled with what he called an “anthropological optimism,” set on fixing the world with a bombastic Alliance of Civilizations alongside figures as questionable as the Turkish leader Recep Erdogan.
His end at La Moncloa was a succession of hardships. He had promised he would never make the most vulnerable pay the price of the 2008 financial crisis, and he ended up a hostage of the high priests of austerity pulling Europe’s strings, forced into spending cuts and a stealth constitutional reform to appease the markets. Even so, he wrapped himself in an aura of honesty when he pledged that he would do everything possible to save the country, “whatever it takes, and whatever it costs me.”
His early years gave rise to no criticism. Not a bad word was heard from him against Rajoy, who had so often mocked him. In the PSOE’s internal leadership struggle, he, like most former leaders, backed the ultimately unsuccessful Susana Díaz. That distanced him from Sánchez — until Sánchez reached power and the relationship slowly improved. And as the old guard, led by González, enlisted in the national anti‑Sánchez crusade, Zapatero ended up as the great historical reference point for today’s PSOE — for its leadership and for much of its membership.
The most striking aspect of his public activity as a former prime minister had been his involvement in the Venezuelan hornet’s nest. For his supporters, it was yet another display of talante, of his desire to act as a good man easing tensions in a distant conflict — a sort of Spanish Jimmy Carter. His detractors, however, found a new line of criticism. Zapatero never publicly criticized Chavismo. According to him, this was to preserve his role as mediator. According to his critics, it was out of complicity with the regime.
The last election campaign revealed a new Zapatero. Now past 60, Bambi became a biting speaker with corrosive humour. He shone as a star and, by all indications, a decisive factor in energizing the Socialist electorate. And he once again became a target for the right. His opponents pieced together another, lesser‑known portrait: that of the lobbyist who may have used his relationship with the government for business and whose involvement in the Venezuelan drama might be far from disinterested. The truth of that account is what Spain’s High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, must determine. On June 2, it will offer yet another snapshot of a democracy that wears down its prime ministers.
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