The Bunker's bluff
Martin Walker
Barcelona Since Franco's death, Spain has confounded those critics who confidently prophesied instant chaos after the removal of his trembling old hand from the helm. But the last Lew months have had an air of phony war about them, and without saying there will be a blitzkrieg of opposition this spring, the Political battle lines have now firmly coalesced. Last week, the two main forces of the °PPosition, the communist-dominated Democratic Junta and the socialist-based Convergency Platform, have finally—and a little susPiciously—joined forces. On Monday evening, I joined by appointment a small "IF°118 of other journalists and self-consel°uslY loitered in the coffee shop of a Mart new hotel before being shepherded d!screetly away to be briefed on the immediate plans of this new coalition. The blood was not chilled. The plan is for ation-wide co-ordinated demonstrations, for which government permission will be sought, based around the uncontroversial
demand of an amnesty for political prisoners and exiles. The auxiliary Bishop of Madrid, half a dozen university deans, film stars, artists and an impressive number of housewives' associations have already promised to join in what promises to be a most decorous occasion. D-day is 4 April.
The purpose of the demonstration is to cement this tenuous new unity of the opposition, to stress to Spain and international opinion that this new force is respectable, huge and responsible, and above all, to take advantage of an ominous split which has now emerged in the government which replaced Franco. This government is an unconvincing blend of Franco's old guard (who go by the gauntly descriptive title of the Bunker) and the technocrats and businessmen who have done very well out of Spain's fifteen-year economic boom, and who yearn for the fat markets of the EEC. These latter, represented by the Minister of the Interior, Senor Fraga Iribarne, and the Foreign Minister, Senor Areilza, know that the price of EEC admission—and of their own long-term political survival—is a degree of reform, some movement towards free elections and free political parties.
Senor Fraga's initial hope was that whatever opposition emerged after forty years of efficient political repression would be satisfied with the minimal amount of reform he believed the Bunker could be persuaded to accept. He has failed, for three reasons which were largely beyond his control. The first was the cool response of European governments to the Foreign Minister's recent tour, from which he had hoped to return with a seal of Euro-approval of the plans for moderate reform. The second reason was the economic recession, its consequent labour unrest, which led to the third, the tragic deaths of four demonstrators at Vitoria early this month.
An uneasy, uncertain strike, which owed more to rising prices than to political frictions, was fanned into fury when the police fired tear gas into a political meeting inside a church, and shot four people dead thereafter. Officially, the shooting was a response to the petrol bombing of one policeman. This justification suffered from the fact that the petrol bomb was hurled some three hours after the first death.
The political result of this regional convulsion, echoed by strikes in the traditionally militant mines of Asturias and the usual closing of universities, was a ministerial crisis which ebbed away when the government realised that, simply by doing nothing as time passed, its fortitude had been slowly rediscovered. The president, Senor Arias, did not have to resign. The Bunker, to everybody's relief, made only ritual growls of complaint. There was no general strike.
The significance of this ministerial crisis has been two-fold. First, the respective nightmares of the left and right, military coup or general strike, like the celebrated dog in Sherlock Holmes, did not bark in the night. It is therefore becoming fashionable to believe that their respective powers have been much overrated:Certainly the recent conviction of nine officers for political sedition in the armed forces (with the prosecution asserting that they were backed by some 960 commissioned sym),athisers) hardly suggests a monolithic military group dedicated to Franco's cause. And that key figure of the influential (and illegal) workers' commissions, Marcelino Carmacho, frankly admits to foreign journalists that the Spanish working class is a long way from the cohesion and militancy required for an effective general strike.
There is more than a grain of comfort for Senor Fraga in all this, particularly since he knows that the movement for reform has the backing of King Juan Carlos. This avowedly constitutional monarch has gently suggested to his Council of the Realm that if they did not accelerate reform themselves, he would be empowered to go above their heads and call a national referendum on the issue.
Those nationwide demonstrations of 4 April are aimed at giving Senor Fraga the support, and the firm nudge, which will persuade him to take those steps and thus to call the Bunker's bluff. To make the demonstrations effective they will have to be enormous, and the current hope on the left is for two hundred thousand in Madrid alone. The need for such crowds partly accounts for the moderate tone of the Communists on the wilder shores of the left in recent weeks and also means that the other great force of the opposition, the nationalist movements of the Basques and of Catalonia, must also be wooed onto the streets.
There remain, however, three great problems. The first is that Senor Fraga, if he is to gain the temporary support of the left to free him from the Bunker, will probably have to accept that the Communist Party too should be legalised and allowed to stand in elections and permitted to legitimise its slow dominance over the trade unions. This he had hoped not to do, but beggars cannot be choosers; and Senor Fraga knows as well as anyone that Spain's Communists are not the Stalinist thugs whose clumsiness was their own undoing in Portugal last summer.
The second great problem is the economy, which has long laboured under the awesome burden of importing twice as much as it exports. This gap has traditionally been bridged by tourist revenues and the remittances of Spanish workers in the EEC. These resources have been savaged by the international recession, just as the oil price and the swelling strikes disturbed the domestic economy.
Finally, there is the great difficulty of expecting rational solutions and political compromises from a country which is just emerging from forty years of the secret police, of Franco, and of deliberately retarded political development. As the exiled anarchist, Miguel Garcia, put it : 'There are two million ghosts hovering over Franco's Spain, and most of them want vengence.' It is this last dash of the irrational which could yet make the mixture explosive.
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