From typicallyspanish.com
Spain Papers Review - Tuesday February 26 2008
By h.b.
Feb 26, 2008 - 9:37 AM
The first live TV election debate in Spain for 15 years dominates all the front pages in the country today.
Most of the editorials follow the party lines of the papers concerned, but the digital versions of many papers have not been updated or have crashed this am.
El Mundo considers that that a convincing Rajoy put a firm Zapatero in trouble while El País says that Zapatero win by the smallest margin. Professional opinion polls carried out all give Zapatero as the small winner. Metroscopia for El Pais has Zapatero 46% and Rajoy 42%.
El País considers it was a hard debate, and says that Rajoy managed to get Zapatero in trouble in the areas of immigration, education, prices and ETA.
ABC says that 60% of the people think Zapatero has been failing in his perceived lack of control on immigration.
Catalan paper, La Vanguardia, headlines that Rajoy attacked Zapatero but gives Zapatero the win, but it was close.
La Razón has also crashed online this morning.
Público uses that curious Spanish word ‘Crispación’ which means, roughly translated ‘tension building’. The paper considers that Zapatero won the debate because of the ‘crispacion’ from Rajoy.
The paper’s poll, carried out with the Sexta tv channel has Zapatero as the winner 45.7%, Rajoy on 30.1% and a draw 24.1%.
In other stories:
El Mundo also considers that the Minister for Tax and the Economy, Pedro Solbes, should give a real explanation of his plans to help those in difficulty in meeting their mortgage payments.
La Razón reports that the booby-trap bomb placed in Bilbao by ETA last weekend was made up of five kilos of cloratita. The paper says that the device was similar to one which exploded outside the courts in Getxo last November, and that it had the bomb disposal officers as its main objective.
La Vanguardia reports that another case of land subsidence has halted construction on the L9 commuter line in Barcelona.
And finally,
Most of the front pages have at least a small amount of space for Javier Bardem, the first Spanish actor to win an Oscar. Público notes he brought Spanish to the ceremony and praised the ‘comics’ of Spain.
(The pdf file for El Mundo, ABC and for El País were all offline today – probably because the papers went to bed late because of the political debate. Apologies for lack of coverage)