Spanish diversions
Martin Walker
Madrid In spite of Opposition demonstrations, prison breaks by Basque guerrillas, the arrest of 300 people and the clubbing and tear-gassing of many more, the event which has most caught the Spanish imagination in recent days has been the loss of the virginity of the nation's most celebrated horse. The most intimate of photographs appeared in the popular press, and the nation held its breath when Chacal's first attempt to mate with the specially-imported American mare Persian Drivers suffered from one of those • problems to which even horseflesh is heir. The second effort was crowned with success, thanks to the able assistance of a kindly and dignified gentleman with the mediaeval title El Mumporrero, and indeed there has been talk of making his magic hand into a national monument.
This is not to say that the nation is ignorant of the tumultuous political events of recent weeks, nor of their ominous implications for the future. But the Spanish people are choosing their own priorities, and to the chagrin of the left and the highly politicised intelligentsia, the Spanish people as a whole are clearly not burning to overthrow the government bequeathed to them by Franco. The King's first visit to the impoverished rural south of Spain was an overwhelming success. The Government has remained unmoved by the moral force of the newlyunited Opposition, and has refused to play the game on the Opposition's terms by treating it as a cohesive 'force for democracy. The Interior Minister, Senor Fraga Iribarne, has intelligently observed that it takes more than pious manifestoes and joint marches to unite Communists and Christian Democrats, and has moved harshly against the former.
This is a particularly neat trick, since it reverses what the united Opposition had been trying to do to his government, by driving a wedge between the Reformists like Sr Fraga and the Bunker, Franco's Old Guard. The key element to bear in mind about post-Franco Spain is that the old Caudillo's repression and policies had inhibited any real political movements from maturing or even from defining themselves for forty years. So we now have an alphabet soup of parties on the left and in the centre, who are so uncertain of their strength or role that they seek comfort in spurious unity. This delights the only real party, the tough old Communists with their 50,000 or so militants, who seek to ride into respectability on the coat-tails of this 'united Opposition'. But this need for unity, and this uncertainty of their own strength, has also persuaded the forces of the right to band together in the same kind of way. And the Government itself, uneasy coalition that it is, faces the same kind of problem. As a result, everybody is trying to split everybodY else's coalition.
In this kind of situation, the bulk of Spain sensibly concentrates on the adventures of its greatest racehorse on the stud farm, and the political race goes to the coolest head. Senor Fraga's toughness in swamping Madrid with police to stop the Opposition's demonstration, and in arresting some 300 Communists, Basque leaders and the best brains of the Opposition (such as the economist Ramon Tamames) revealed his confidence that he has the coolest head in Spain. He has returned to the Franco tactic of repression without unleashing the kind of general strike, bloodin-the-street chaos which had been feared. He has recovered the confidence of the Bunker, those alarmed Fascist veterans who felt that this young Sr Fraga was uncomfortably clever and suspiciously liberal. And he appears to have maintained his links with the Christian Democrat, liberal Conservative wing of the Opposition, which meeklY obeyed his prohibition of their Madrid demonstration.
Sr Anton Canellas, a Barcelona jeweller, is one of the most respected of such moderate figures of the Opposition. Alone of the Christian Democrats, his party in Catalonia fought against Franco, and yet he would be prepared to join Sr Fraga, he told me, if some key conditions of amnesty for political prisoners, regional autonomy and a guarantee of free elections could be met. The biggest fear of Senor Canellas was not the right, but the threat of the Communists taking over the trade union movement as they did in Portugal, and making up for their weakness at the polling booth with their strength in the factories. It is this fear which enables Sr Fraga to continue with his policy of eroding the political alliance of the Opposition, and as more and more of his policies of electoral reform, trade union reform and constitutional change are published, it will be a very stupid Spanish politician who does not see the attraction of accepting a partial democracy which .is designed to exclude the Communist bogeymen.
But it will be a fine-run thing for Sr FragaAlready his great rival for the mantle of the Reformist Minister, the Foreign Secretary Sr Areilza, has mused to his friends on the advantages he might win by a quick resignation. It could make Senor Fraga look all the more like the heir of Franco he claims rot to be. It could give Sr Areilza a key voice in the debate now enthralling the Christian Democrats and liberal Conservatives about the wisdom of their political alliance with the left. So Sr Areilza represents a weak flank at a time when the Government must hold firm if its new tough policy is to sUcT, ceed. And even if Sr Fraga has disposed 01 the political threat of the Opposition coalition in Madrid, we have yet to hear from the militant Basques and the regionalist
Catalans, who have never yet lost their capacity to frustrate the stern rule of Madrid. More than a third of those 300 arrests were of Basque militants, but by doing this, Sr Fraga may well have roused the threat, not scotched it.
Amid all this, there is the economic crisis, and the growing sense of panic in the Ministry of Tourism that the strike of hotel staff in Majorca will not be settled before the season begins. In Spanish industry as a Whole, ten times as many working days were lost through strikes in the first forty days of this year as in the whole of 1975. We have strikers on hunger strike, strikers' wives barricaded in churches, strikes on the telephone system and Spanish strike leaders at the Michelin factory co-ordinating their tactics with the Michelin work force in Spain and Germany. As the Socialist leader in Barcelona, Sr Ignatius Urenda, points out: 'If this Government cannot be pergiaded to reform by political means and Political arguments, then it will have to be Persuaded by industrial action—and see bow long the Government's capitalist allies Will stand for that'. But Sr Urenda glumly recognises that the divisions within the trade unions could permit Sr Fraga once again to split this new and more formidable opposition.
There have already been nasty scenes at meetings of the illegal Workers' Commissions with Trotskyist militants being barred from speaking by Communist toughs, and Maoists have been beaten up by Anarchists and there has arisen in Barcelona a new schism inside the Communist Party which could provide us with a kind of Catalan Trotsky. The name he assumes for party Purposes is Ignasi Bruguera, and he is a lawyer who works with the syndical movement and who, after twenty years membership of the party, is on the executive committees of both the Catalan and Spanish Communists. He has taken the view that the trade union movement does not need the authority and structure of the Communist-dominated Workers' Commissions, nor does it need the Catholic and Socialistdominated unions USO and UGT. He holds that the workers should organise themselves into autonomous factory assemblies, where there is enough militancy and leadership for the workers to create their own structures, and develop whatever kind of federation they choose.
The trade union question is complicated bY. the weighty presence of the only legal ?Mon in Spain, the Syndical, designed and unloosed by Franco to force the working class to be organised within a corporate, classically fascist structure. Sr Bruguera had a great deal to do with last year's elections of officials for the Syndical, when the left succeeded in electing its own unauthorised delegates in most of the major enterprises in Spain, and forced the Syndical to accept thtsfait accompli. Sr Bruguera has now been Purged from the party, and a significant Proportion of Catalan party militants have resigned in sympathy. They are already
being denigrated as 'fiquidationists' and the party is gearing itself up for a major campaign to denounce them as crypto-Anarchists. In Communist parlance, these are terms of terryifying abuse, and they go some way to confound those commentators who claim that the Spanish Communists are gentler, more democratic and less rigorous than their European comrades.
All this has accompanied a great debate on the left about the future of the trade union movement, whose likeliest outcome is that the Communists will stand by their Workers' Commissions, the Catholic left and the Socialists will stand by the USO and UGT, and the centre will be terrified by the attempts to create some kind of federation of these bodies, which the Communists will endeavour to dominate. If and when that happens—and much will depend on the promised world boom and Spain's own crisis of unemployment and inflation—then the Government will face a co-ordinated trade union challenge which will be very much more coherent and dangerous than the present flimsy political alliance of the Opposition.
But for the moment, Sr Fraga and the Government would appear to have some room for manoeuvre. And should another political crisis arise, then no doubt arrangements can be made to divert the nation by arranging a second stud farm performance by Chacal the Wonder Horse.
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