Zapatero Steps Up

"Aim well, miliciano, for you defend the Republic." On a barren hill in Asturias, Spain, near the border with León, José Fernández, a Loyalist soldier, etched this phrase into wet cement in September 1936, adding, "The Trench of Captain Lozano." Written to commemorate a friend who’d been shot weeks before by Nationalist troops for refusing to desert the army of Spain’s democratically elected government, Fernández’s words remain visible in the rough stone 70 years later. They are a potent tribute to Lozano, a soldier who gave his life for the republic’s ideals. But in today’s Spain, there is a memorial even more powerful: the man named José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who, in addition to being prime minister, is Lozano’s grandson.

Zapatero’s heritage is not insignificant. The man whom some Americans consider this generation’s Neville Chamberlain is, for the people who elected him, more activist than appeaser. In his first year in office, Zapatero has pulled Spain’s troops out of Iraq, dismantled the obstacles to the European constitution that his predecessor, José María Aznar, erected, and led a crackdown on Islamist terrorism that has yielded hundreds of arrests. But even more striking are the social changes that his government has initiated within a remarkably brief period of time: gay marriage and adoption are now legal, domestic violence laws are tougher, and long-standing subsidies to the Catholic Church are being eradicated in an attempt to create a genuinely secular state. Some read these changes as little more than leftist interventionism, but others see them as the first serious attempt to honor the promise of civil rights in Spain’s 1978 constitution and a long overdue effort to eradicate the lingering effects of the regime that killed Zapatero’s grandfather, along with hundreds of thousands of other Spaniards.

This April marks the anniversary of Zapatero’s first year in office, and to say that the year has been a remarkable one would be an understatement. For a man once known as Bambi (both for his doe-like eyes and gentle -- some would say bland -- personality), it has been a year of striking accomplishments. But more extraordinary is the depth of change that has occurred in Spain itself, a once firmly Catholic and staunchly traditional country.

Consider the plight of women. Under Francisco Franco -- and remember, his rule lasted until his death in 1975 -- they had no independent legal status. They could neither work outside the home nor open a bank account without permission from their husbands or fathers. Divorce and contraception were illegal, and domestic violence was not a crime. Once the dictator died, the harsher elements of his gender policies slowly disappeared: Equality before the law was guaranteed in the 1978 constitution; divorce became legal in 1981; abortions for women who had been raped or whose pregnancies endangered their health were permitted after 1985; and, in time, increasing numbers of women entered universities and the workplace.

Still, Spain lagged behind other Western countries on many important gender issues. The 1981 divorce law, for example, paternalistically required that a couple be separated for a full year before they could begin marriage dissolution proceedings. In 2003, twice as many Spanish women as men were unemployed. And in 2004, Amnesty International criticized the failure of the Aznar government to stem domestic violence.

Then came Zapatero. As a candidate for prime minister, he promised that he would appoint equal numbers of men and women to his cabinet -- no small guarantee in this historically machista country, and a vow that Marta Ortíz, president of the Spanish chapter of the European Women’s Lobby, says she had heard before. Ortíz, who has worked in the women’s rights movement since Franco’s death, says, "Experience had taught me that campaign promises are made to be broken. But as soon as he took office, Zapatero did what he said he would do." Indeed, eight of the 16 ministers sworn in before King Juan Carlos in April 2004 were women. And then, as María Teresa Fernández de la Vega recounts, "He went even further than he had promised; he named me the first female vice president." With these appointments, Spain became one of just two countries in Europe to achieve gender parity at the highest level of government.