Domestic policy of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
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Domestic policy of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero describes the domestic policy of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who became the Prime Minister of Spain on April 18, 2004.
The first law his government passed was against gender violence. At first, Zapatero wanted it to protect only women, forgetting other victims like children, elders or men. According to the General Council of the Judicial Power, that stance made the initial draft unconstitutional as it discriminated citizens for their sex. Finally, the text was changed and the term 'especially vulnerable victim' substituted that of 'woman' in the articles defining the new punishments established by the law. After that change, it was approved unanimously. Text of the law.
Zapatero has declared that his government will not be "soft on terrorism" and will not allow regional nationalists to endanger Spanish unity. The most important cause of his comment seems to have been his alliance with Republican Left of Catalonia, a pro-independence Catalan party whose leader (Carod-Rovira) met some ETA terrorists secretly in January 2004. According to the Spanish newspaper ABC, Carod-Rovira promised to provide ETA with political support if the terrorist group did not act in Catalonia what seems to have been confirmed by the ETA announcement of a truce affecting only that region some months later. There has been a serious increase in the number of terrorist attacks since the Socialist victory (although without any victim until now, February 2005).
The biggest defiance against Spanish unity has come from Juan José Ibarretxe [1] - the head of the Basque Regional Government. His so-called Ibarretxe Plan is a reform of the statutes now regulating the functioning of the Basque Autonomous Community considered almost equivalent to a declaration of independence by its opponents. The plan was drafted by the Basque regional government and approved by the Basque regional legislature over the opposition of the Socialist and People's parties. The People's Party pressured Zapatero to prevent the vote from taking place, but Zapatero, while vowing to oppose the plan, insisted that it be debated and subject to a vote (which was sure to be negative with the opposition of PSOE and PP). The Spanish National Parliament rejected the plan as expected. The plan then became a major campaign issue in the April 17 elections to the Basque Regional Parliament. Zapatero has stated that hewill support any reform to the Statute of Autonomy which is supported by 2/3 of the Basque Regional Parliament, which given the distribution of seats means that if the Basque Socialist Party approves of the reformed text, but then the PSOE will support it at the national level.
Another of Zapatero's electoral promises was making housing more accessible. Housing prices have increased largely in the past two or three years in Spain. For that purpose he created a new ministry. The Minister of Housing (Ministra de la Vivienda) has declared that her intention is not to reduce the prices but to allow people to obtain a house more easily. In Zapatero's first year as prime minister the cost of buying a house has increased around 17% on average [2].
In October 2004 Zapatero's government undertook the task of morally and legally rehabilitating those who were suppressed during and after the Spanish Civil War, by instituting a Memory Commission chaired by Vice-president María Teresa Fernández de la Vega. Some accused him of deliberately limiting the commission's mandate to focussing on left-wing victims of right-wing oppression by excluding the incidents in Republican territory (the response of the government is that the memory of that victims doesn´t need to be vindicated cause the Franco regime did already). According to Newsweek [3] Zapatero's grandfather's, in his will, called on family members to clear his name "when the time is right."
In December 2004, Zapatero became the first prime minister to face an Investigative Committee after being interrogated by the Committee created to discover the truth about the March 11 bomb attacks [4].
Zapatero has announced his intention to undertake limited reforms to the Spanish Constitution (but he has not made clear yet what he wants exactly to reform, how and why). He legalized same-sex marriage in Spain (including adoption rights) in 2005. That decision, and the project of legalizing euthanasia (later withdrawn), together with the changes in the teaching of religion in school and the projects of modifying the financing scheme of the Catholic Church, are the main factors in the growing tension between the Socialist government and the Roman Catholic Church. [5].
