A bad start for Mr. Bean, Zapatero, in Europe

Lee este artículo en español | 06-01-2010| Inglés Político

A smiling Mr. Bean took centre stage on the new EU Spanish Presidency website for a few hours, provoking laughter in media outlets around the world.

The web page collapsed under the weight of so many visitors after it went viral briefly but not for the reasons Mr. Zapatero would have liked.

In an interview with El Mundo, the webmaster said:

“I thought we’d already built a lot of security measures, but they are consolidating and strengthening them further. They’re going over everything and creating new security measures to stop the website going down again under the weight of so many visitors. Unfortunately Mr. Bean proved a bigger draw than the topics the European Union normally publish on the page.”

The fact that the web page contract -— awarded to Telefónica — was worth nearly €12m, hasn’t gone down very well either with many people, when both the laughable security failure and the fact that we’re in the middle of a recession are taken into account..

The Popular Party will try and take advantage of the blunder and bring up the issue in the Spanish Congress. They are going to ask about the total cost of the page, the security lapses and: “Spain’s image and prestige”.

International media quickly published the story and Zapatero and the Spanish Presidency became the global laughing stock of the day.

The BBC published a story with a headline that read: “The new European president is … Mr. Bean”; even the Financial Times published it, but went for a more aggressive headline: “Mr. Bean takes down EU website,” whilst noting that there is a certain physical similarity between Mr. Bean and Mr. Zapatero.

More seriously, the FT also made the most of the incident to warn of the possibilities of Zapatero stumbling over the next six months, during a presidency which will be crucial for dragging Europe out of recession.