Spain discovers El Factor Hillary: All eyes are on the candidates' wives in the run-up to the election. Phil Davison in Madrid on the pretenders to the throne of Second Lady

ONE IS AN MP, a child of the 1968 student uprisings, a translator of Italian poetry and a woman rumoured to be drifting apart from her husband. The other is a Treasury lawyer who prefers to emphasise that she is irreplaceable at home and that her most important role is to stand by her man. Both are young, attractive and intelligent.

The two women are competing for the title of Spain's 'La Segunda Dama' or the Second Lady (the First being Queen Sofia). They are married to Spain's party leaders - Felipe Gonzalez, the incumbent Socialist Prime Minister, and Jose Maria Aznar, the Conservative opposition leader - and they are likely to have a significant influence on the outcome of the general election in five weeks' time, just as Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton did on the American presidential election. The 'Hillary Factor', or 'El Factor Hillary' as the newspapers call it here, has come to Spain.

Until recently, candidates' wives were of little importance in Spanish politics. Spain is a notoriously macho society. When Mr Gonzalez surged to power in 1982, women had only just begun to emerge from the long shadow of the Franco dictatorship, not to mention the previous half-millenium of Catholicism. When Franco died in 1975, a man could still kill his wife and her lover at the risk of mere 'banishment' from the area. The most common contraceptive was coitus interruptus.

Thus, in 1982, Carmen Romero, Mr Gonzalez's wife, though a party militant and a teachers' union campaigner, did not enter the election equation. She was rarely in the public eye, except when she was photographed tumbling down steps in an evening gown in Mexico in 1983.

Women's rights, and with them their self-awareness and assertiveness, have changed beyond recognition since then, thanks largely to the policies of Mr Gonzalez and his Socialist Party. An Equal Opportunities Bill was passed into law in 1987. But old habits die hard: women earn on average 20 per cent less than men for similar jobs and sexual harassment is still something of a national pastime.

More than half the voters are women. And, increasingly, they make up their own minds about voting rather than following their husbands' politics. That is where the Hillary Factor may come in. Ms Romero is 45 and, like her husband, an Andalucian from Seville. They have two sons and a daughter, all students. She is shy, introverted, artistic. She wears little make-up, dresses conservatively and avoids interviews like the plague. But, when the last elections were held in October 1989, she told friends she was fed up with being 'Mrs Prime Minister' and had decided to strike out on her own and 'be myself'. She opted to run for Parliament, as a Socialist candidate for the Andalucian province of Cadiz. Her priority on the party ticket made election a virtual certainty. That is not so this year, with Mr Aznar's Popular Party (PP) making inroads in the traditionally Socialist south.

To many Spaniards, Ms Romero has been a disappointment. She has a horror of public speaking, which may help to explain her near-silence in the last legislature, and she has a mixed reputation in Cadiz, though not for any lack of effort. She frequently abandons the prime-ministerial residence, the Moncloa Palace in Madrid, to follow projects in Cadiz, where she is usually accompanied by her blonde personal bodyguard, Hortensia.

'I think the best word to use for Carmen Romero would be anodyne,' Malen Aznarez, society editor of El Pais, said. 'I think many feminists expected more from her, given her position, but they have been disappointed.'

Another newspaper colleague was harsher: 'You could count the number of times she has spoken in Parliament on one hand giving a victory sign.'

Her rival, Ana Botella, is 39, from Madrid, the eldest of 13 brothers and sisters. The Aznars also have two boys and a girl, all of school age. Like Ms Romero, Ms Botella was educated in a convent, in her case by Irish nuns in the capital. She was virtually unknown until her husband, who has just turned 40, surged to prominence this year as the Conservatives caught up the Socialists in opinion polls for the first time in Spain's modern democracy.

Oddly, she is employed by Mr Gonzalez's men in the Treasury Ministry. She has played down her job in recent interviews, perhaps because it is said to be a sensitive one involving tax-related personal reports on people's property and possessions. 'I do juridical reports. I don't want to say more.'

More because of the American election's timing than anything else, she was immediately labelled 'Spain's Hillary' earlier this year as she accompanied her husband on party tours. She knocked down the comparison as strongly as Mrs Romero does the 'Mrs Prime Minister' tag, saying she did not intend to take part in government if Mr Aznar wins. She has nevertheless dropped increasing hints about upgrading the 'Mrs Prime Minister' role in order to make it a useful job in itself.

'I've never claimed to be a Hillary,' she said in a recent interview. 'I'm much more of a house buddy. In my home, I'm irreplaceable. But I would gladly give up my job to carry out the duties of Second Lady. All I want to do is help my husband.'

She is probably the only person in the entire country to 'find Jose fascinating and funny'. She would, she has said, 'put my hand in the fire' over his marital fidelity. But, when commenting on the election campaign rumours over Bill Clinton's affairs, she added: 'Nobody in Spain believes a politican could ruin his career over an affair. Latin societies are much more liberal than Anglo-Saxon societies, whose puritanism is well-known.'

'I think she could play a significant role in the elections,' said Pilar Rodriguez, a 30-year-old advertising executive who has voted for the Socialists in the past but is reconsidering this time.

'More than ever this time, women are going to vote their own way. In the case of Felipe, he is the one with the charisma. Aznar doesn't have it, but his wife does. I think her key attraction is that they're a normal family. She's super-normal and appears to be super-in-love with her man.'