Spain’s Socialist Party, led by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, won a second four-year term in weekend elections. The party gained three seats in parliament but fell short of a governing majority. Zapatero first beat the ruling Popular Party four years ago in the days after the deadly March 11, 2004, bombing of a commuter train in Madrid, leading to charges from the right that the victory was more fluke than mandate. The Popular Party, led by Mariano Rajoy, also gained seats in the election.

The Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, will today outline how his re-elected Socialist government will save Spain from economic crisis.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's premiership was reconfirmed by parliament Friday, April 11. He faces a second term of economic challenges and continuing concerns over regional separatism.

Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero addressed parliament Tuesday on the goals for his second term, including moves to boost the flagging economy, fight terrorism and end discrimination.

One of the first tasks of newly re-elected prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero will be to inject life into Spain's faltering economy to prevent a crisis of confidence turning into something worse. The governing Socialist party won Sunday's parliamentary election, without an absolute majority, after a bitter campaign where the faltering economy took a central role.

Spain’s ruling Socialists will not be partying for long. A second successive term in office, with an ex­panded majority, is a personal victory for José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the prime minister. But there is little else to celebrate. After an uninspiring first four years in office, Mr Zapatero now faces the daunting task of rescuing an economy that is heading for the rocks. If ever there were a general election worth losing, this was probably it.

Spain's Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero returned for a second four-year term as prime minister on Sunday. Though his re-election may help quell criticism that his 2004 victory was a reaction to the 2004 Madrid train bombings, it has not given him the clear mandate he wanted, particularly as the country's economy heads into a troubled 2008.

Spain's elections have produced two big political forces each with conflicting visions of the world, presenting the Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, with an uneasy ride as he faces the problems of a flagging economy, a resurgent terrorist threat and a militant Catholic Church.

After the fireworks of Sunday's general election, Spain's victorious socialists are sounding less euphoric and the defeated conservatives less despondent. The ruling socialists may have won more votes and more seats than four years ago, but voters did not give José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the socialist leader and prime minister, the absolute majority he had asked for. His party will be seven deputies short of that goal in the 350-seat parliament.

Reelected in circumstances similar to in 2004, Zapatero will likely demure to the EU when it comes to international politics. Except in the bloc's relations with Latin America, where he can take a lead role.

Spain's José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero Sunday won a second term, and his first mandate untainted by a large-scale terrorist attack. While his 3.6 percentage point victory over the conservative opposition Popular Party was convincing, Mr. Zapatero would be wrong to interpret Sunday's results as an unequivocal endorsement of his policies, or to minimize the challenges ahead. The next four years will arguably prove more difficult than his first tour in office.

With the market floundering, the foreclosure rate in Spain has more than doubled in recent years, according to industry estimates.

The rate of broken marriages has risen steadily since Spain legalized divorce in 1981, but a recent reform allowing couples to accelerate the divorce process has caused those numbers to skyrocket. Spain now has one divorce for every 2.3 marriages — an increase of 74% in the past two years alone.

For the past decade, Spain has been a job-creation machine. During that time, the country has generated the most new jobs among the original 15 members of the European Union. With an average gross-domestic-product growth rate of 3.75%, it has been a peppy engine for the continent's economy.

How to deal with restive Catalans and Basques is an important campaign issue. The conservative Popular Party (PP) accuses Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist government of failing to defend national unity.

Spain's general election campaign, now reaching its climax, has been a dispiriting spectacle. Against the background of an economy weakened by the end of cheap credit and a sharp property market correction, the contenders seem to be trying to bribe or frighten Spanish voters

The votes of millions of Spaniards either looking for work or fearful of losing it in a rapidly slowing economy are crucial to the outcome of Spain's election on March 9.

The Spanish election this Sunday is too close to call. What is certain, however, is that the winner will spend the next four years cleaning up an economic mess of a scale not witnessed in Spain in modern times.

Spain's elections this Sunday could send a fresh jolt through the country's power sector.

The Parliament, fulfilling a campaign promise from 2004 by Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, ordered that families wanting to unearth bodies of relatives killed during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s or who suffered as a political consequence of General Francisco Franco's four-decade-long regime should get full cooperation from the state, and at the same time that every province in the country must remove remaining monuments to Franco.

The Spanish government on Monday dissolved Parliament and called general elections for March 9, officially opening what promises to be a close race between the governing Socialists and the opposition Popular Party.

Madrid's popular mayor has been barred by his own party from standing for parliament, as Spain's conservative opposition sought to end a succession struggle that was undermining its leader, Mariano Rajoy, ahead of a general election in March.

Spain's conservative opposition on Tuesday named a prominent businessman as a parliamentary candidate and promised to cut corporate tax in a bid to win voters unnerved by signs the boom could turn to bust.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose political fortunes as Spain's prime minister have been buoyed until now by a thriving economy, is in a race against the clock.

Half of Spain's real estate agencies have folded in the past year due to a slowdown in the once-booming building sector, an industry association says.

For decades, awards ceremonies at international competitions have been awkward occasions for Spanish athletes. As representatives of a nation whose anthem was wordless, they stood at podiums in pained silence, or hummed along while others sang. This past summer, the Spanish Olympic Committee sought unsuccessfully to end that humiliation.

The Polish duo wants to limit gay rights; Prime Minister Zapatero expands them with gusto. But on the global stage, these national leaders stand together, having both marginalized, needlessly one hastens to add, themselves and their once up-and-coming countries.

Economic growth in Spain, where housing prices have doubled in six years, slowed in the second quarter as rising interest rates damped construction.

Spain's economy is already faltering as interest rate increases begin to bite and a nine-year property boom starts grinding to a halt. Many analysts forecast that house prices will fall nationwide as early as next year.

Hundreds of estate agencies across southern Spain have gone out of business in a trend that experts say signals the end of a buoyant housing market that has fuelled the country's economy over the past decade.

Spain\'s 10-year economic boom finally showed signs of stalling yesterday as the socialist government of the prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which faces an election in March, admitted the country faces an uncertain future.

Having gained 190 percent since 1998, one of the world's hottest property markets has finally succumbed to high lending rates, oversupply of a million homes in the past four years and prices that are up to 30 percent overvalued.

The events unfolding in Spain at the moment, and the turmoil in the world credit markets, are a harsh wake up call for those who have forgotten, or simply just never considered, that most bubbles do ultimately burst.

The Portuguese writer and Nobel Laureate José Saramago has outraged his compatriots by urging Spain and Portugal to unite in a single country that he proposes to call "Iberia".

Twenty-nine suspects, most of them Moroccan, are on trial in the Spanish capital for their alleged roles in the Madrid train attacks. The attacks were claimed by Islamic radicals to avenge the presence of the country's troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A research2 of the Spanish real-estate market states that the practice of buying residential property off-plan and selling it before the title deed has been signed can generate capital gains of over 846% in under a year.

Spain has agreed to end its opt-out from the European Union's year-old code of conduct on arms sales designed to open up national defense markets to more cross-border competition, the EU said Tuesday.

The number of Spaniards over 80 has increased by 66 percent over the past 15 years, compared with a 13 percent rise for the rest of the population, the Labor Ministry said in a report on Spain\'s steadily graying society.

Three years after the Madrid bombings, the threat is believed to be growing as militants reorganize.

A glance across the hazy Madrid skyline or a stroll through the city's congested streets reveals the motor that has driven this country's dazzling economic performance over the past decade. Spindly cranes pierce the horizon; scaffolding straddles the sidewalks; immigrants in dusty boots and hard hats haul bags of cement and handle ear-splitting drills.

As American comic actor Robin Williams observed a long time ago, it’s time to have a woman president because she would never make a bomb that would kill anyone, just really annoy them. And with a woman president, he said, there wouldn’t be any wars – just really intense negotiations. Maybe that’s what Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was thinking when he named nine women to his 17-member cabinet, including a top job, Defence Minister, to the very-pregnant Carme Chacon, who looked great striding before an army honour guard, even if they were pretending not to notice the obvious.

Tony Blair liked nothing better than to show off his credentials as a world-class politician (and forget the gathering storms at home). France's Nicolas Sarkozy has a similar penchant for inviting the cameras on official trips and foreign holidays. The Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is, however, famously reluctant to reach for his passport.

The most controversial decision that Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has made in his three years in office was not to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq or legalize gay marriage. Instead, it was the prime minister's move this month to convert the prison sentence of a high-profile member of ETA, the Basque separatist group, to house arrest.

If America unified following 9/11, Spain split along sharply sectarian lines within hours of the commuter-train bombings.

Spain has given a reasonable impression of a shambles since the Basque separatist terrorists of ETA closed out 2006 with the detonation of a large bomb at Madrid airport, killing two people and demonstrating what they thought of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's peace negotiations.

Devant la preuve que Chichi a conseillé M6 d’embêter l’Espagne sur plusieurs dossiers, presse et internautes ibériques sont furieux. « Chirac fêlon », « La traîtrise de Chirac »… Depuis deux semaines, la presse espagnole tape à bras raccourcis sur notre Jacquot tricolore. La cause de ce déchaînement ? Une note confidentielle de la DGSE, l’espionnage français, qui figure dans le livre de nos confrères Nicolas Beau et Catherine Graciet, Quand le Maroc sera islamiste.

Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who earned great popularity by withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq in 2004, has used his political capital to broadly reshape life here, pushing Spain to the left both socially and politically. One result is the opening of deep rifts in a country long dominated by religious conservatism.

When asked about current relations between Muslim and Western societies, most people are likely to think about the "cartoon crisis," the controversial remarks of Pope Benedict XVI regarding the Prophet Muhammad, or the debates raging in many European countries over the wearing of veils by some Muslim women.

The Bush administration denied Spain’s request in January, saying that the sale would strengthen the government of President Hugo Chávez, which is hostile to American interests, and destabilize the region. Permission from the White House was needed because the aircraft would use American technology.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Prime Minister of Spain and Secretary General of the Socialist Party, arrived to power at a time nobody expected, not even inside the Party. Keen on populist tirades against the United States "Dickhead Bush" and "Ketchup Queen Kerry", his whole campaign did not bring much attention until the moment Al-Qaeda decided to blow up Madrid trains, killing almost 200 people and bringing to an end Spain's membership of the West.

Support for Israel has never been a hallmark of European leaders. But Spanish Prime Minister José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero recently recorded a new low in the history of the continent’s contempt for the Jewish state.

The results of Sunday's referendum in Spain's northeasternmost region, Catalonia, were foreordained: residents voted overwhelmingly for more autonomy, including more say over judicial affairs and a bigger slice of tax revenues. The real challenge had been to get the government in Madrid to agree to a referendum to begin with.

Retrouver le rang perdu par le port de Sebta, tel semble l’objectif des autorités espagnoles. Le gouvernement ibérique doit annoncer dans les prochains jours le nom de l’entreprise de transports sélectionnée dans le cadre de la ligne d’intérêt public Sebta-Algésiras.

More than six months have passed since last autumn's violent urban riots, and France finds itself engaged in another parliamentary debate on the integration of immigrants. The right wing, which advocates a "chosen immigration," and the left, which anticipates a "disposable immigration," share a firm belief in French Républicanisme, a social contract that owes much to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's fantasy of an irresistible general will overcoming particular interest.

ETA has killed more than 800 people in the last four decades in its quest for Basque independence, despite the fact that Spain’s post-Franco constitution gave it the largest amount of autonomy among the seventeen regions into which the country was divided.

The international community lacks updated information on the latest stage of the Basque conflict—the longest enduring violent conflict in Western Europe—and the emerging opportunity for a peace process among the key parties to it. This report examines recent promising developments, outlines remaining obstacles, and offers recommendations to ensure that the present opportunities for peace in the Basque Country are not lost.

Last week, not for the first time since he left office, Spain's former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar had lunch with President George W. Bush at the White House. He's doing a lot better than his socialist successor Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero at staying in touch with the Bush administration.

Freedom of expression is one of the cornerstones of our democratic systems and we shall never relinquish it. But there are no rights without responsibility and respect for different sensibilities. The publication of these caricatures may be perfectly legal, but it is not indifferent and thus ought to be rejected from a moral and political standpoint.

"We cannot ignore conflicts that have become entrenched or the enormous economic, political and social divides in many societies, which occasionally serve as false pretexts for terrorist violence. It is unrealistic to aspire to peace and stability in a sea of universal injustice."