By
Sajjad Shaukat
Recall that three days before the general elections in
Spain, the train bombings in Madrid on March 11, 2004, which killed more than
200 people turned the election results in favour of Jose Luis Rodriguez
Zapatero whose Socialist Party won the elections, as he had said that
Spain where the “US war has been deeply unpopular”, “would withdraw its
troops.” While government led by the Prime Minister Jose Maria staunchly
supported the American-led war in Iraq lost the election. General masses in
Spain held the North African immigrants linked to Al-Qaeda for the train
bombings, while the Prime Minister Aznar’s attempts to blame the attack on
Basque terror group ETA backfired the voters.
Immediately after his victory in the Spanish
elections, Zapatero had announced that Spain would withdraw its troops from
Iraq. The statement of the Zapatero was greatly criticized by America that was
made after the bomb blasts in Spain.
The victory of the Socialist Party in Spain was being
called by some in Europe and America as a victory of terrorism, a precedent
that offers Al-Qaeda or groups like it the notion that they can alter the
democratic process with bombs and murder. A former member of the Spanish
Parliament, Pedro Schwartz remarked, “Al-Qaeda won the election”.
Similarly, three days before France’s presidential
elections, held on Sunday (April 23, 2017), a French policeman was shot dead
and two others were wounded in central Paris on April 20, this year
whena gunman wielding a machine gun leapt out of a car and opened fire on the
Champs-Elysees, Paris’s most famous boulevard. Via its Amaq news
agency,the Islamic State group (Also known as Daesh, ISIS, ISIL) claimed that
the attack was carried out by “Abu Yousuf al-Baljiki (the Belgian) and he is
one of the Islamic State’s fighters.”
French President Francois Hollande said
that he was convinced the “cowardly killing” on the Champs Elysees boulevard
was an act of terrorism.
Karim Cheurfi, a 39-year-old French national who
was shot dead by the police was identified as the attacker.
Prosecutors said that a note defending ISIS fell out of his pocket, although
there was no previous evidence of radicalization.
After the shooting, the three main candidates canceled
campaign events and instead made televised statements in which they competed to
talk tough on security and vowed a crackdown on ISIS.
The incident brought issues of terrorism, security and
immigration back to the forefront of the campaign. The
ultra-nationalist and far-right candidate—the anti-immigration National Front
leader Marine Le Pen demanded the closure of all
Islamist mosques, repeating her call for Europe’s partly open borders to be
closed. He has also called for campaigning generally to be suspended.
Le Pen’s opponents, meanwhile, urged France to stand
against the hard-line rhetoric that has dominated her campaign.
Prime Minister Cazeneuve Bernard accused
Le Pen of trying to capitalize on the attack by seeking to exploit fear “for
exclusively political ends.”
As regards the results of the first round of the
presidential election, the French Interior ministry announced on Monday (April
24) that centrist Emmanuel Macron of the independent En Marche party won 23.75
percent votes and the far-right’s Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front
party won 21.53 percent votes.
According to a poll from Ipsos/Sopra Steria, “Emmanuel
Macron and Marine Le Pen will face one another in the final round of the French
presidential election on May 7. Macron is expected to win the second round of
the French election with 62 percent of the vote versus 38 percent for Le Pen.”
