Time to get serious.

Today the President of Spain has officially dissolved Congress and announced the King the dates for the electoral contest. The race is on and now it's time we all Socialist unite and work together for a new mandate on March 9.

Having said that, it's Zapatero who needs to get serious about it now. His announcement yesterday in El Mundo that international institutions, not the Spanish Government, had kept contact with ETA even after the terrorist attack in Madrid in December 2006 is certainly a big blow to PSOE's moves to neutralise ETA as a campaign issue.

Zapatero is an extremely polarising character. It's the kind of politician that either you hate or you love. He should try to soften that. Although his Presidency has been an enormous success and has moved Spain forward after 8 years of inmovilism under Aznar's Government, it's obvious that its communication policy has been extremely poor. A Government that has achieved high economic growth, created employment and promoted social rights vanguard of the world, cannot be ahead just by 3 points, within the statistical margin of error, in today's Cadena SER Pulsometro poll.

I still believe the contest can be won and it will be won and with a bigger majority than polls show these days. But it should have been a victory with a certain absolute majority and this is not the case. If Zapatero is reelected he should certainly think about his communication strategy and should bring in new faces to his communication team. PSOE under Zapatero has modernised the party's internal structure and equated it to other modern social democratic parties in Europe, specially Labour in the UK. It's time he brings in professional communicators to his team, so many achievements this term aren't being explained properly to the people. And to those that could be thinking that I'm talking just about spin and image over substance, I'd say that communicating with the citizens is an essential goal of Parliamentary democracy.

Time to professionalise political communication within PSOE, a radical reform in Ferraz HQ is essential to avoid this term's problems next time around.