25 JUNE 1977, Page 7

Euphoria in Spain

Raymond Carr

Madrid On Monday, 13 June, the last day of the campaign, the streets were littered with handbills, the confetti of some vast national Political fiesta. Every inch of wall space was Plastered with posters. There were the last of the mass meetings (there had been 4.000 hoiirs of them every day) and the last of the Political speeches on radio with their commercial jingles as if the parties were selling refrigerators rather than programmes. Mass meetings, that caused the biggest traffic jams ever, were morale-raisers for the militants and spectacles for the curious in the nineteenth-century tradition rather than a means of conversion. Parties like the nght-wing Popular Alliance and the Catalan Republican left pulled in the crowds but not the votes. If posters count for anything then an obscure, bespectacled leftist, Amancio Cabrero, should have galloped home in Madrid. He came a cropper instead. The only people who benefited were the printers. The final TV appearances of the major candidates were supposed, to be decisive; they were flat, dull but profitable to Prime Minister Suarez and the Socialist pop star Felipe Gonzalez.

Election day was 'enormously tranquil' as the Minister of the Interior put it, but also enormously confused. Voting papers arrived at Vallecas, the great working-class centre of Madrid, two hours late, wet from the printers. Long, patient queues stood outside the polling stations — it took up to an hour to vote. Inside, the rooms were crammed. Most did not use the cabins for the secret Senate vote; those that did entered in gossiping groups and most had no clear idea for whom or what they were voting. That there was little pretence of secrecy does not mean that the elections were not 'clean', as the Spanish phrase has it. It was all about as unlike a British general election as one can conceive; but it was also unlike the rough Spanish elections of the thirties, as the voters over sixty repeatedly told me.

Nor did the atmosphere turn nasty when the mechanics of vote counting collapsed — Presumably a triumph of human nature Over electronics. In the huge Congress Hall (journalists told me it was the most lavish display of modern facilities they had seen in any country) we watched television screens Which showed no results, the tedium of frustrated expectation relieved by a sexy singer. Having been told by the Minister of the Interior that we would see how things were going by 2 a.m., we reeled into breakfast after a night on coffee and cigarettes without the faintest notion of what was going on; nor were we much clearer by lunch time. If

tranquil, it was surrealistic. The campaign was financed — apart from the contributions of sympathisers — by bank loans which the parties hoped to recoup by government contributions to successful parties. Two parties will be in the red: Fraga's Popular Alliance (AP) and the Christian Democrats. For both the results were a sheer disaster.

The electorate rejected AP because, with its collection of ex-ministers, it smelt of forty years of dictatorship; this was the clearest indication that the electorate rejected Francoism out of hand. Fraga tried to frighten the electors with Franco's bogeys of Marxism and separatism. They saw through it.

The Christian Democrats simply vanished. Ruiz-Gimenez, ex-minister it is true, but a man whose periodical Cuadernos pare el dialogo was once a nursery of opposition (many socialist intellectuals first appeared in its pages) failed to get a seat. The Christian Democrats neither asked for nor received the blessing of the Church (apart from a few extremists of the Marxist Christian left and the hard right, the Church was silent). They wanted to be a centre party but that space was already occupied by a stronger contender: the Democratic Centre (UCD) of Adolfo Suarez.

The victory of Suarez was confidently predicted by the polls. He didn't need to campaign: he came with all the prefabricated prestige of the Prime Minister who had brought democracy to Spain (Note Centre — Vote Suarez — Vote Democracy' was the TV and radio jingle) and not least as the .king's man, the king who by appointing him had been the 'motor of change'. His picture all over Madrid showed him calm; his TV performance was adequately dignified. The electoral coalition he led—it included fifteen disparate parties — appeared fragile and doomed to dissolution. In victory it looks much more like a party than a mere opportunistic coalition of men greedy for power, its image in its opponents' propaganda. What sort of party it is was perhaps best revealed by its post-election celebrations in a plush hotel: the Madrid bourgeoisie out in strength and smart clothes, presided over by a busty blonde. UCD conservatism was apparent in the King's forty-one nominated senators, a mass of old political hands and the Prime Minister's friends, watered down by a few intellectuals including the novelist Camilo Jose Cela.

The UCD beano was vastly different from the equally euphoric celebrations of the runners up: the PSOE, the Spanish Socialist party. They were held at the party headquarters and the street outside in a working-class district; the hero was Felipe Gonzalez, the wonder boy of a mushroom party confidently declaring his readiness to form a government should his party win a majority.

why was the PSOE vote so large? I think because many non-Socialists regarded the PSOE as a more decisive rejection of the past, a party with better democratic credentials than the UCD, a party that wanted real changes in a society stricken by political and social ankylosis. Though the PSOE looks more of a party than the UCD. it is still politically inexperienced and organisationally weak, its professed moderation still to be tested against the strains of radicalism at the base. Will it split, as did the party during the Second Republic, between parliamentary Socialists like Prieto and those dragged along by the left like Largo Caballero? One hopes history will not repeat itself.

The restrained Eurocommunism of Santiago Carillo's Communists (the PCE and its Catalan branch, the PSUC) paid less electoral dividends than expected. Carillo explained this relative failure (twenty seats) by the fears created by Franco's forty years of exploitation of the Communist bogey. More probably, when all seemed touched by the glamour of youth, the party looked as elderly as its leader and in some way bound to the past by figures like Dolores Ibarurri, La Pasionaria of the Civil War. Carillo looks what he is: an old, experienced communist apparatnik. His TV performance, delivered with an unlit cigarette in his hand, was schoolmasterly. His newer followers are an odd lot: one (the inevitable political tourist's informant, a taxi driver) told me he was, yes, against capitalism, he only wanted a car, a modest flat in Madrid, a small house in the country 'for the holidays'.

The only other significant force on the left is Tierno Galvan's Socialist party (PSP-PPS) with its six seats. I have always been puzzled by Tierno's hold on Spaniards. At his meetings, dancing and slogan-chanting left-wing hippies drowned all other speakers; yet Tierno held them Silent. Partly he is respected as a long-time opponent of Francoism, as an honest man in the dishonest world of politics — `muy formal' as the idiom goes; but he also represents a dangerous streak in the Spanish Political mind — its respect for intellectuals to general. His TV performance was a university lecture, not a campaign speech. When I asked centre voters who their sec

0d choice would be they all replied ' ri

Tierno'. 'He is a professor' they said — the Oddest reason I can think of for voting for anyone.

The nationalist parties did less well than many hoped and some feared. Thus the main Basque Nationalist party (the PNV) felt the weight of the industrial workers who Voted PSOE. A respectable bloc of Catalanists is home and dry; but the size of the PSOE vote surprised even the Socialists. Valencian regionalism — very vocal when I was there a month ago — simply collapsed as the unreal thing it is; more surprisingly, Galician regionalists did little better. This by no means entails that the Suarez government can delay a settlement of the nationalist question. Here the all-important factor is that the PSOE is committed to autonomy for Catalonia and the Basque country. The government must negotiate a settlement quickly with Catalans if it is to avoid a unilateral declaration of the old 1932 Autonomy Statute and the return of that relic of the past, Tarradellas, as President of the Gene ralidad, the autonomous government of Catalonia, decreed out of existence by Franco in 1938.

The regional problem is only the most Pressing and explosive of the problems arez faces. Apart from drafting a Constitution he must deal with an inflation running at over 20 per cent if democracy is not to be discredited, as it was in the Second Republic of 1931, by a decline in prosperity, falling real wages and a consequent radicalisation of the world of labour.

Spain, the homeland of fissiparous politics, now has something like a two-party system. But not quite. Suarez, just short of an overall majority, must either get support for a minority government or widen his own government.. Candidates for the second Option include the Catalan democrats, the P. NV and even Tierno Galvan, however odd It looks to have a Marxist in an anti-Marxist

coalition. It is hard to see how Suarez can avoid an attempt to find a working arrangement with the PSOE which, as that, old Falangist Emilio Romero pointed out with some glee, was the real victor. That the PSOE's price for collaboration will be high there can be little doubt: complete amnesty for political prisoners; autonomy statutes more radical and granted sooner than the UCD would like; acceptance of the PSOE economic policy which puts full employment above all else. Only in return for a real fiscal reform, which will make many UCD supporters squeak, will Suarez get some sort of social contract. The PSOE remembers with bitterness that the stabilisation programme of Franco bought monetary stability at the price of a wage freeze. 'Those of always' — the workers — must not suffer again. • But Gonzalez cannot bid too high. Should the PSOE become an obstructionist party it may well find its new supporters falling away, leaving it. at the mercy of its militants.

Spain is now a democracy that will have to even out the social and economic inequalities of the modern consumer society that grew up in the 'sixties. There is reason enough for euphoria and selfcongratulation at the dull, boring and peaceful birth of the first government for forty years legitimised by a free vote. To test the reactions of the police I yelled 'Long Live the Republic' in the streets; no one stirred..

But democracy by itself solves nothing. Dictatorships subject only to informal pressure groups can suppress regionalism and switch economic policies, as Franco did in the 'fifties. Democracies are faced with the institutionalised pressure groups in the form of parties; they must compromise, accept the rules of the game. There is the army, ready to crack down, if they prefer confusion to consensus.