José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero On 12 October 2003, during the Fiesta Nacional de España military parade held in Madrid, then opposition leader and presidential candidate Zapatero remained seated as a U.S. Marine Corps honour guard carrying the American flag walked past Zapatero and other VIPs. Everybody else stood as with the rest of the foreign guest armies representations. He declared afterwards that his action was a protest against the war and certainly not intended as an insult to the American people. Later on, during an official visit to Tunisia shortly after Zapatero was elected, he asked all of the countries with troops in Iraq
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