Politics & Power Quote by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero

Zapatero’s sentence is a diplomatic pivot dressed as moral clarity. By “aligning ourselves with Kerry,” he’s not just endorsing a candidate; he’s signaling a wholesale realignment of Spain’s posture in the post-9/11 alliance system. The phrasing is deliberately transactional: allegiance “for peace, against war” reframes foreign policy as an ethical referendum, not a strategic calculation. That’s the point. It turns the Iraq debate into a clean binary and, in doing so, delegitimizes the Aznar government’s closeness to Bush without having to name Bush at all.

The subtext is domestic as much as international. After the Madrid train bombings in March 2004 and the political firestorm over Spain’s involvement in Iraq, Zapatero needed to convert public grief and anger into a coherent governing mandate. “No more deaths for oil” is a blunt populist cudgel: it collapses complex geopolitics into a motive ordinary voters recognize as cynical and corrupt. It also implies that Spain’s previous sacrifices weren’t just tragic but duped.

Then comes the most revealing word: “dialogue.” It’s an insistence that Spain’s seat at the table was denied or squandered, and that a Kerry presidency would restore a more multilateral, consultative style. “The new Kerry administration” anticipates regime change in Washington as if it’s already scheduled, a bit of rhetorical brinkmanship meant to pressure the U.S. while flattering Europe’s preferred storyline: that a different America is possible, and imminently.

It works because it fuses grief, legitimacy, and alliance politics into a single promise: we can break with the war without breaking with the West.