IT'S NOT EASY to reconcile this with this:

Xenophobia has expanded alarmingly across Spain in the last eight years, according to a study.

The report shows the number of people expressing adverse feelings toward immigrants grew eight percent between 1996 and 2004.

Based on a series of interviews by a team led by María Ángeles Cea, a sociologist at Madrid's Complutense University, the study found that 32 percent of the Spanish population have an unfavourable view of immigrants and that this percentage has grown in line with the increase in Spain's immigrant population over recent years.

Let me start saying thay I'm definitely pro-immigration. But it makes you wonder why a government headed by someone who says he wants to follow the will of the people is at the same time declaring an amnesty for illegal immigrants, in a scale with no parallel anywhere else in the EU, precisely when people are having less possitively feelings towards immigration.

Of course, it's impossible to make conclusions from a poll without seeing the details of how it's done. Generally, very few people in Spain are against all immigrants. There's no general problem with people coming from Latin America, even South Saharan Africa or the Far East (of course neither there's any problem when they come from Western countries). The uneasiness is generally only for Middle Easterners and Eastern Europeans; the former because of their refusal to assimilate into Western culture, and the latter because of the sometimes unfair reputation of being associated with organized crime.

So, what does Zapatero government intend? Some people are saying that he's trying to follow the 'Miterrand rule' which propiciated Le Pen: let the pressure grow until there's a popular demand for quite drastic measures against immigration. Since the right-of-center party (the PP) is also generally pro-immigration, this would probably lead to the appearance of some new extreme right party (there's none in Spain at the moment; a unique phenomenon for a major European country, possibly due of the still recent memories of the Franco dictatorship). If a new, right wing party emerges, it would eat some of the PP's electoral base and therefore would weaken its chances of winning the Socialist party in future elections.

Not sure if the theory is right, but if it is it's certainly playing with fire. And it will likely backfired: look at what happened with Lionel Jospin, the Socialist candidate to the French presidency, in the last election. Le Pen had grown so much that it was him who confronted Chirac at the second leg of the polls.