The Infantile Prime Minister

MADRID -- ETA announced a cease-fire on March 24, 2006. Only nine months later, on December 30, the Basque terrorist group blew up the parking lot of the brand new Terminal 4 of Barajas International Airport in Madrid, killing two people. It was not until two days ago, though, when ETA made a public statement announcing the end of the truce, that Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero admitted that "ETA had finished off the cease-fire." The prime minister apparently attaches more significance to ETA's statements than its bloody actions.

This episode is typical for Mr. Zapatero, who is a man of visions, and thus often has great difficulty adjusting to reality. Peace with ETA has been his biggest gamble since coming to power after the March 11, 2004, terrorist attacks. He won on a platform opposing the Iraq war, and wanted to apply his strategy for peace in the Middle East also to Spain. He believed his surprise election victory gave him a bigger mandate than it actually did.

It took two years for ETA to seemingly accept the prime minister's overtures. They certainly must have appreciated how Mr. Zapatero sidelined those members of his Socialist Party who advocated a tough line against the terrorists. The public never learned any of the details of the meetings that took place between the government and ETA. Visions apparently require a cloud of secrecy. But according to Spanish press reports, such meetings continued at least until this April, four months after the Madrid airport attack.

The terrorist outreach program also benefited those ETA members jailed under previous governments. Take the unrepentant Iñaki de Juana Chaos, who in 1987 was sentenced to 3,129 years in prison for the deaths of 25 people. After staging a hunger strike in November, claiming he was ready to die if he wasn't released, the government decided he deserved a change of scenery. On March 1 he was sent to a hospital near his hometown in the Basque country. To make sure he wasn't too lonely there, the authorities let his girlfriend move into his room as well. The two could be seen taking daily walks and going shopping in the hospital's neighborhood. This absurd spectacle ended only yesterday when the government sent him back to prison, no doubt in reaction to ETA's official return to terrorism.

Life for ETA's political activities also became easier under Mr. Zapatero. Spain had long outlawed Batasuna, ETA's political arm. The terrorist group repeatedly tried to circumvent the ban by changing the party's name, but in the past the interior ministry would see through the charade and refuse to register the "new" party. Previous Batasuna councilors would hand over most of their salaries to ETA. Without those donations from elected officials, ETA's finances were running dry.

That's why it tried a new tactic for last month's local and regional elections. ETA infiltrated an existing party that had not run for elections in decades and had no proven affiliations with the terrorist group. Because the government failed to ban this new ETA front, several of their candidates were once again elected as local councilors. So the state's money is now running back into to the bank accounts of ETA's political wing.

Having thus exhausted the usefulness of further talks, ETA has gone back to its old terrorist ways, which it never really abandoned. After all, they knew pretty well that even Mr. Zapatero could not agree to the release of all convicted ETA killers, which is what the terrorists demanded.

During Mr. Zapatero's three years in office, the cohesion of the Spanish kingdom has also suffered elsewhere. In order to gain power in Catalonia, his party entered a coalition with extreme left-wing nationalists in late 2003. Together they produced a new local constitution, which Spain's parliamentary ombudsman -- a former Socialist justice minister -- denounced as incompatible with the nation's Constitution. The Spanish Constitutional Court is currently revising the text, which gives Catalonia's regional government even a role in foreign affairs. It was therefore only logical that, earlier this year, Spain's Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos received the Catalonian vice president with much of the same pomp and ceremonial protocol usually reserved for visits by foreign dignitaries. So Spanish cohesion is now threatened from within the system by Mr. Zapatero's allies in Catalonia, and from without by the same Basque terrorists who as recently as Tuesday were still on speaking terms with the government.

The prime minister's domestic troubles are compounded by the fact that he has lost his allies in Europe -- Gerhard Schröder in Germany and Jacques Chirac in France -- while the only potential friend, Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, prefers to keep him at arm's length. Mr. Zapatero has never had a warm relationship with British Prime Minister Tony Blair or his successor, Gordon Brown. His political partners today are Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez.

Despite his open show of hostility to the U.S., Mr. Zapatero craves few things more than Washington's recognition. It took three years of begging before U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice finally paid him a visit last Friday. It's not just Mr. Zapatero's decision to pull out Spanish troops from Iraq and his vitriolic attacks on U.S. foreign policy that have soured relations. Madrid's coziness with Havana also remains a bone of contention between Washington and Madrid. Ahead of her visit, Ms. Rice made it clear that she would like to discuss why, on his recent visit to Cuba, Mr. Moratinos met with the government but gave the cold shoulder to important dissidents. Lacking a good answer, the Spanish government launched an infantile counterattack. On the very same day of Ms. Rice's arrival in Madrid, Spanish Defense Minister José Antonio Alonso suddenly accused U.S. forces of a "disproportionate" bombing of Taliban positions in Western Afghanistan. Never mind that the alleged transgression happened back in April and Madrid hadn't uttered a single word about it until now. And for good reason, as Spanish troops are deployed in Western Afghanistan and those "disproportionate" U.S. attacks may have also improved their security.

That's how Mr. Zapatero reacts when things don't quite work out as planned. He throws dirt like a child in a sandbox. It's high time for Spain that a grown-up returns to office.