José María Aznar

José María Aznar in 2003

José María Aznar López (born February 25, 1953) is a Spanish politician who served as the Prime Minister of Spain from 1996 to 2004. In office, Aznar carried economic liberalization and deregulation to prepare Spain for entering the eurozone, and aligned closely with the United States in foreign affairs. His center-right People's Party began declining in support after Aznar supported the Iraq War. Aznar subsequently caused the PP under his successor Mariano Rajoy to lose the 2004 Spanish general election to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's Spanish Socialist Workers' Party after he refused to acknowledge al-Qaeda's responsibility for the 2004 Madrid train bombings, which he blamed on the ETA.

Sourced

• You know in this moment some perpetrators of the attacks, but you do not know who imagined the attack, who is the leader of the attack who is the idea (sic) of the attack, who established and supported means for the attacks, who defined the logistics of the attacks, who established the strategies of the attack. Nothing...I think that one part of the perpetrators are Islamists, but I think that not only is an Islamist attack.
  • In: Entrevista BBC Aznar, 24-07-2006
  • About the 11 March 2004 Madrid train bombings

• Catalan language is one of the most complete and perfect expressions that I know from the point of view regarding language, I not only read it since many years ago, but I understand it. Moreover,I speak it intimately too.
  • In: L' Aznar destrossant la llengua catalana, December 2006.
  • On an interview with the Catalan Autonomous Television, just before politically coallitioning with Catalan, Canarian and Basque nationalists

Quotes about

• The record clearly shows that jihadists see the run-up to an election and the months just afterward as an opportune time to act. Everyone remembers the Bin Laden video that was released days before the 2004 presidential election and the Madrid train-station bombings that occurred 72 hours before Spain’s national elections in March of that year. When the conservative government of José María Aznar mistakenly attributed the attacks to Basque separatists, the public punished his party, which was felt to be pretending that its unpopular support for the war in Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks. The socialists, led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, had been trailing in the polls, but after the government’s blunder, they thumped the conservatives by a five-point margin. Those are only the best-known jihadist interventions. Alongside them should be added the first bombing of the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, a little more than a month after Bill Clinton took office, and the attack on the USS Cole on Oct. 12, 2000, three weeks before that year’s Bush-Gore matchup. Last year, radicals attempted multiple car bombings in London and Glasgow, Scotland, three days after Gordon Brown’s June 27 installation as Britain’s prime minister. And let’s not forget the murder of Benazir Bhutto while she was campaigning in Pakistan or the September 2004 bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, which preceded the Australian elections by a month.
  • Daniel Benjamin, “Why Do Terrorists Love To Strike Around Elections?”, Brookings.edu, (October 22, 2008)