Madrid  - Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Wednesday hailed the victory of US president-elect Barack Obama as opening the way for "more positive" bilateral relations.

Madrid would be a "friend and faithful ally" of Washington, said the Socialist premier, whose decision to recall Spanish troops from Iraq led to a cooling of relations with the administration of outgoing President George W Bush in 2004.

Spain and the United States could work together in areas where Spain had useful experience, such as Latin America, the Middle East, the Muslim world and Africa, Zapatero explained.

Obama's triumph opened "a road of hope and trust for the world in moments of difficulty and uncertainty," the premier said in his congratulating telegramme to the new US president.

Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos expressed trust that Obama would soon receive Zapatero, in contrast with Bush, who did not meet bilaterally with the Spanish premier.

Zapatero's conservative predecessor Jose Maria Aznar was one of the staunchest US allies in the Iraq conflict, but Zapatero withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq immediately after his election victory in March 2004.

Parliament president Jose Bono stressed the importance of the end of the "Bush era."

"Even before I knew the (election) result, I said that anything is better than Bush," Bono, a Socialist, quipped.

Representatives of Spain's black community meanwhile welcomed Obama's victory as changing the perception the world had of black people.

"This totally changes the vision" that people have of "the capacity of the black community," said Luis Alberto Alarcon, an Afro-Colombian activist who lives in Madrid.

Obama's election as US president proved that blacks could reach the highest levels whenever "the political context allows them to move forward," Alarcon, who heads the Spanish section of the ecologist Life Foundation, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Antumi Toasije, president of the Pan-Africanist organization Centro Panafricano, described Obama's triumph as a "moral victory."

"This debunks the idea that the United States is the most racist country in the world," Toasije told dpa, stressing that blacks still lacked for sufficient representation in European power structures.

Toasije and Alarcon estimated the number of Latin American descendants of Africans at 120 million. Hundreds of thousands of them live in Spain, which also has hundreds of thousands of Africans, they said.

Hundreds of Americans and Spaniards celebrated Obama's victory overnight at a Madrid arts centre, while Republican candidate John McCain's supporters in Madrid staged their own party. (dpa)