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 1,300 Spanish troops in Iraq. The decision aroused international support worldwide, though the Bush administration claimed that terrorists could perceive it as "a victory obtained due to the 2004 Madrid train bombings". John Kerry, then Democratic party candidate for the U.S. Presidency, asked Zapatero not to withdraw the Spanish soldiers. Some months after withdrawing the troops, the Zapatero government agreed to increase the number of Spanish soldiers in Afghanistan and to send troops to Haiti to show the Spanish Government's willingness to spend resources on international missions approved by the United Nations. On 8 June 2004, with the withdrawal already