Do terrorists play election politics?

The bombings in Spain now reverberating around the world are raising the specter of a new phenomenon: the possibility of a terror group bringing down a government.

While it is not yet certain that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks - or that the bombings alone were responsible for the fall of the Spanish government - the impact of the strikes nonetheless has affected everything from Wall Street to the political cohesiveness of Western democracies.

This, experts say, is raising the possibility of an emerging new tactic of terror groups worldwide. After Spain, terrorists are likely to draw the conclusion that carefully timed attacks can influence electoral outcomes. To be sure, militant groups throughout history have used bombs and bluster to try to deliver political messages.

But never before, analysts say, has an attack led to the fall of a government. While many factors ultimately lay behind the defeat of retiring Prime Minister José María Aznar's conservative Popular Party in Sunday's election, the Madrid massacre is widely believed to be one of them.

Consequently, the bombings and their aftermath could embolden terror groups in the future. "The attack was obviously an operational success, but it achieved a political outcome too," says Jim Walsh, an international security expert at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, John Howard in Australia, and Tony Blair in England have to be more worried today than they were four days ago."

Like Mr. Aznar, those leaders supported President Bush's war effort in Iraq, without the approval of their electorates. They may fear building pressure for change within because of these attacks.

Yet the bombings could produce the opposite result as well. History suggests that influencing nations through terrorist acts is not a definite science. Examples abound of countries gaining in fortitude in the face of bald strikes: In the US after 9/11, in Italy in the 1970s against the Red Brigade, and more recently in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and several other countries hit by Al Qaeda groups.

"Rather than bringing us to our knees, we initiated the greatest onslaught on terrorism directed by a nation-state," says Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terror at the RAND Corp. in Washington, of the US's response after Sept. 11.

The European Union, for its part, is setting up an emergency meeting for Friday to deal with the rising terrorist threat, which may leave the Continent more united in its response as well. What those nations' relations will be with Washington, however, remains less certain.

For now, the attacks do carry the thumbprint of Al Qaeda. Tuesday, Spain named five additional Moroccan Muslim militants as suspects in helping plant the bombs. Three others - with known links to Al Qaeda - are in custody.

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