SPAIN

Guardian: Spanish leader accuses Bush and Blair
Threat to pull troops out of Iraq as row over election result escalates

Spain's new prime minister, the Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, yesterday followed his dramatic election triumph with a pledge to bring troops home from Iraq and accusations that Tony Blair and George Bush lied about the war.
"Mr Blair and Mr Bush must do some reflection _ you can't organise a war with lies," he said in his first radio interview after ousting the ruling conservative People's party in a Sunday election dominated by the terror attacks on trains that killed 200 Madrid commuters last week.

"The Spanish troops will come back," he added.

His stinging comments caused political shockwaves across Europe and in the US. Sunday would go down in history as "the day when Islamist fundamentalism was seen as dictating the outcome of a European election", said Wilfried Martens, the head of the European People's party, an umbrella group for European conservative parties.

Jonathan Eyal, the director of studies at the London-based Royal United Services Institute, said if al-Qaida were responsible for last week's bombs, Spain had become the first country "to have a prime minister owing his position to Bin Laden".

"Der Vorwurf der Konservativen, kann so nicht ganz gelten. Die Leute scharen sich im Normalfall nach solchen Anschlägen um die aktuelle Regierung. Herr Aznar hat, als er in den Irakkrieg gezogen ist die Meinung von 98% der Bevölkerung ignoriert. Am Sonntag erhielt seine Partei dafür die Quittung."