MADRID: The assassination of a former politician in an attack blamed on the Basque separatist group ETA will not have a major impact on Sunday’s general election in Spain, which the ruling Socialists remain favourites to win, analysts said.

“The influence of this attack should not be very strong, even if every attack tends to slightly favour the ruling party because people rally around the government,” sociologist and public opinion expert Fermin Bouza said.

The only exception to this rule was the impact of the March 11, 2004 train bombings, which killed 191 and led to the surprise general election win three days later by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, he said.

Then, voters punished “bad management by the government” after it insisted ETA was to blame for the attacks even though evidence pointed to Islamic extremists angered by Madrid’s role in the Iraq war, he said.

Isaias Carrasco, a former Socialist town councillor, was shot at short range on Friday in the Basque town of Mondragon and died shortly afterwards.

There has been no claim of responsibility for the attack but police said it bore the hallmarks of ETA, which has killed over 800 people in bombings and shootings in its nearly 40-year campaign for an independent Basque homeland.

If ETA is confirmed to have been behind the attack, it will be the group’s first confirmed killing in Spain since it officially called off a 15-month ceasefire on June 2007.

Spanish political parties ended their election campaigning after the attack.

The president of the Sigma Dos polling firm, Carlos Malo de Molina, said the assassination would have conflicting effects at the ballot box.

The attack could fuel “frustration” at the unending violence on the part of ETA and the absence of a solution to the “Basque problem”, he said.

“On the other hand the victim is Socialist, and people will back the victim,” he added.

The last opinion polls published in Spain gave the Socialists a lead of about four percentage points over the main opposition Popular Party (PP) which has made the government’s failed peace talks with ETA a central campaign issue.

ETA blamed a lack of concessions by the government in the peace talks for its decision to call off the ceasefire.

“ETA is trying to have an impact on the election but this will not have a great impact on the results,” the editor of centre-left news magazine Cambio 16 and Basque specialist Gorka Landaburu said.

“People have already made up their minds,” he said, adding the assassination could lead to a “higher voter turnout” without altering the final result.

Before campaigning officially got underway on Feb 22, Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba warned that ETA would “try to kill before the elections” and he put the country on a “maximum terror alert”.

“Unfortunately we are used to attacks. I maintain my prediction that we will have a PP victory,” despite the polls, said Ricardo Montoro, a sociology professor at Madrid’s Autonomous University.

In a televised address, Zapatero said ETA would fail in its effort to interfere in the election with its assassination of Carrasco.

“Spanish democracy has demonstrated that it does not allow challenges from those who oppose its basic principles and its most essential values,” he said.—AFP