Because a self-styled al-Qaida spokesman had said last week's multiple train bombings was retribution for Aznar's support of the U.S.-led Iraq war, the argument goes, Spaniards wanted to distance themselves from Washington hoping to ward off other terrorist attacks. In the aftermath of their party's humiliating defeat, PP spokesman are pushing this line. Pundits on both sides of the Atlantic have also embraced it.

More ominously, al-Qaida is probably congratulating itself on its apparent success in disrupting the political process and altering the course of Spain's elections, and could be planning to try the same tactic in other elections.

The reality is somewhat more complex -- though many refuse to believe it.

"I don't think the al-Qaida bombing was a decisive variable, but the circumstances around it stimulated the vote for the opposition," Spanish political scientist Julian Santamaria Ossono told United Press International Tuesday. Santamaria runs an independent polling company in Madrid, NOXA Consulting.

The conventional wisdom in the run-up to the Spanish vote was that the PP, led by Aznar's handpicked successor Mariano Rajoy, was headed for a certain third term. In fact, says Santamaria, the margin between the government and the opposition Socialist Labor Party, or PSOE, had been steadily narrowing since the beginning of 2004. At the start of election week, it was anybody's race.

A NOXA poll published in the newspaper Vanguardia on March 7 showed that the PSOE had closed the gap with Aznar's PP to 2.5 percent. Then on Monday of last week, a different poll published in another leading paper, El Pais, showed the PP winning, but losing their absolute majority. The poll showed the PP dropping 11 seats in the Spanish Parliament and the PSOE picking up 16 seats.

In a partial poll Wednesday by NOXA, interrupted on Thursday because of the bombings, the two parties were "projected as obtaining the same number of votes," Santamaria said. When the polling was resumed on Friday, it showed a surge of votes and a victory for the Socialists -- although Santamaria says the two results were not comparable because of variations in the polling sample.

In the election, the Socialist party of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero received 2,989,935 votes more than it had in the general elections of 2000, but the PP lost 690,666 votes. The PSOE ended up with 164 seats in the 350-seat chamber and the PP with 148.

Analysts say Zapatero owes his victory to young first-time voters and to others who had not gone to the polls in the last election. "The new votes came from Socialist supporters who decided to vote this time because they saw that the PSOE had a chance to win," said Santamaria. "This was already the emerging trend before Thursday's bombings."

Government attempts to keep the blame pinned on the Basque separatist group ETA when the signs were pointing to an Islamic fundamentalist operation fueled public resentment and revived memories of the still unsupported evidence cited for attacking Iraq. "Same guys, fresh lies," one commentator remarked in English.

For the government, an al-Qaida connection was bad news. If ETA was responsible, the government's policies would not have come under much scrutiny. The Aznar government actually has a good record of fighting the Basque militants. The organization is said to have been weakened because many of its key figures have been arrested. But with evidence piling up of a possible al-Qaida attack, the Spanish government faced the emergence of Aznar's support of the Bush administration's war in Iraq as a thorny key issue in the eleventh hour before the election.

According to press reports, the Aznar government instructed Spanish ambassadors to continue to stress the ETA connection. When Foreign Minister Ana Palacio defended this development, she inadvertently echoed the circular language used by President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and others to justify their pre-war statements about how Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.

"I haven't told anyone to say anything we did not believe," she said defensively. "The truth is we really believed what the investigators believed and this was the version we had. The idea honestly -- honestly -- was that it was ETA."

Another Spanish source said resident foreign correspondents had also been called into the Spanish Foreign Office and told in a briefing that ETA was responsible.

As one Spanish official put it Tuesday: "The al-Qaida bombing definitely had an impact on the election result. But al-Qaida didn't win the election. President Bush lost it."

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