José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero an MP he was finally exempted. Zapatero attended his first political rally, organized by the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in Gijón in 1976. Some political parties had been legal since 21 July 1976, but the PSOE was not legalized until February 1977. The speech of Felipe González, the PSOE leader and future Prime Minister of Spain, who took part in the rally, exerted an important influence on Zapatero. He said, among other things, that "the Socialists' goal was the seizure of power by the working class to transform the ownership of the means of production" and that "the PSOE
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to be illegal and was opposed to the very concept of preemptive war. On 26 May 2003 a Yakovlev Yak-42 plane carrying Spanish soldiers home from Afghanistan crashed in Turkey. The plane had been hired by an agency of NATO. Zapatero blamed Aznar and his government for neglecting aspects like the plane insurance or safety. Further, Aznar had rejected calls for a full inquiry into the crash. After the 2004 March elections it was proven that there had been serious irregularities in the identification of the corpses resulting in a high number of mistakes. Concerning the European Constitution, Zapatero criticized