Spain

on the World Today

LEGEND has it that when Generalissimo Francisco Franeo-Bahamonde, the Caudillo of Spain, moved into the royal palace of EL Pardo back in 1939, he ordered his aides to place a wastepaper basket on each side of his massive working desk. One basket he labeled “Problems that need immediate solution”; and the second, “Problems that time has solved.”

Time, the Caudillo’s greatest ally, has already solved Spain’s most pressing problems. But the one problem it has not yet solved is that of Franco s succession. It promises to be the thorniest issue facing the cautious ruler. For here he is dealing with the volatile political temperament of the Spanish people. There is no question that he is worried. For the political future of Spain depends, in his view, on the continuity of his regime.

The question of the succession has been solved in theory. In 1947 a national referendum proclaimed Spain a kingdom without a king. The Cortes, or Spanish parliament, subsequently established a Council of Regency and a Council of the Realm, and designated Franco chief of state with life tenure. This decree, called the Law of Succession, provided t hat the ful ure king of Spain, or regent, be a Spanish male Catholic over thirty years old, and of course of royal blood. The argument in favor of a relurn of the monarchy was that the national unity and destiny of Spain could best be served by a restoration of her traditional form of government. The regime, in so deciding, chose to ignore the fact that the monarchy, as a political institution, is not only unpopular but completely discredited in the eyes of most Spaniards.

The Falange, official party

The first to manifest its discontent was the Falange, Spain’s only official political party and one of the pillars of the “National Movement,”as Franco calls his regime. Originally conceived as a small revolutionary party patterned after Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, the Falange’s membership was never over 30,000 before the civil war. But today it has become a vast political melting pot whose adherents are hopelessly confused and divided against themselves.

Falangist ranks have been infiltrated by extremists of both right and left. “Traditionalists” and religious and monarchist fanatics were incorporated into the once revolutionary, antimonarchist, anticlerical Falange by Franco’s executive order early in 1937, at a time when these two rival factions were threatening to fight it out in a small-scale war. Socialists and Anarchists flocked to the Falange’s black and red banner to seek political asylum during and aftcr the civil war.

The Falange has also suffered from an inundation of “ pansistaor,”hangers-on who care little for ideology but who saw in the party a chance to attach themselves to government payrolls. The result after eighteen years is that the Falange has ceased to be a party in the strict sense of the word and has become an amorphous bureaucratic association paying only lip service to the ideals of national socialism.

The Falange’s one source of power lies today in its control of the nation’s labor unions, which include an estimated 8 million wage, earners. The hierarchy of t he Falange, aware of the unpopularity of the party with the mass of public opinion, fears that a return of the monarchy will mean an end to its bureaucratic monopoly over jobs. One possible solution for getting Falangist support for a monarchist restoration would be to have the government “institutionalize” the party, thus giving it legal standing and making its social and political doctrines a fundamental part of Spanish constitutional law. But this the Franco government has so far failed to do.

Division in the Catholic right wing

The regime’s second prop, the Catholic right wing, is also a house divided against itself. There are roughly three major political groupings within Spanish Catholic ranks. On the extreme right are the superconservatives, the Traditionalists or Carlists, who are split in their allegiance to the future king, one faction supporting the candidacy of Don Xavier of Bourbon Parma, and another giving only lukewarm support to the official pretender, Don Juan Carlos. There are also a number of other splinter groups, each with a candidate of its own.

The center group of Catholic opinion is concentrated around the Catholic Action movement and includes Spain’s able Minister of Foreign Affairs, Don Alberto Martin Artajo, and Monsignor Angel Herrera, the outspoken crusading bishop of Malaga. Generally speaking, Catholic Action supports ihe Bourbon candidacy to the Spanish throne.

To the left of Catholic Action but nevertheless a part of the Spanish Catholic right are the so-called Christian Democrats, who presently lack any recognized leadership and who are themselves subdivided into republican and monarchist; factions.

The pro-Fraiteo Army

The Army, the third and perhaps most powerful of the regime’s three props, is solidly Francoist. But what it will be in a post-Franco Spain it is difficult to say. By and large the leaders of the officer corps are believed to be in favor of a monarchist restoration. A politically neutral faction within the Army is headed by the present Minister of t he Army, Augustin Muñoz Grande, a popular and able officer more concerned with military history than politics, who, like most of his brother officers, is an unconditional Francoist.

The left constitutes the great unknown of contemporary Spanish politics. An exact assessment of its strength is impossible under present conditions. The reasons are obvious: it is voiceless, leaderless, unorganized, but like Banquo’s ghost it is omnipresent.

Cutting diagonally across all the diverse political elements that make up the National Movement is the intellectual dividing line of the “Spain ” and the “anti-Spain.”The “Spain” school of thought holds that the national destiny can best be realized through the preservation of traditional Hispanic values. It rejects alien philosophies and influences such as, for instance, the French Encyclopedists and the democratic tradition derived from the French Revolution. As an intellectual movement it is spiritual and mystic, almost fanatically religious, profoundly antimaterialistic, and basically react ionary.

The “anti-Spain “school of thought, on the other hand, argues that national salvation lies precisely in the abandonment of Spain’s traditional, clannish thinking. It is anticlerical and holds that Spain must liberalize its thought and align itself more with the intellectual West if it wishes to move with the times.

Students riot

The Madrid University riots of last February revealed the strength of these factional differences that have rent the National Movement. Rebel students and their leaders were no left-wing hotheads preparing the great anti-Franco revolution. They were sons of well-to-do. God-fearing Spanish fat hers of the upper class who were intimately connected with the regime.

The first indication that things were not as they should be came last autumn when a government-sponsored poll was conducted among a selected cross-section of university students. The poll revealed that the overwhelming majority of those questioned opposed the regime. As a result of this poll, Pedro Lain Entralgo, the rector of Madrid University, was asked to draw up a report on the disturbing student situation. The Entralgo report, a 3500-word pamphlet entitled “The State of Mind of University Youth,” recommended, among other things, that the government allow students greater freedom of expression. Neither the Entralgo report nor the results of the poll were reported in the censored Spanish press.

In his customary New Year’s Eve radio address, Franco appealed to the youth to “fight the venom of materialism . . . and the forces of evil bent on destroying Spain.” The Caudillo moreover cautioned them against “the winds from outside seeking to penetrate the windows of our fortress.” But Franco’s admonition came too late.

On February 4, some 3000 Madrid students signed a petition demanding the free election of delegates to an allstudent congress. This was an immediate challenge to the student university syndicate controlled by the Falange. The rector, Laín Entralgo, thought it wise to let students blow off a little steam. He and the dean of the law school, Manuel Torres López, consequently agreed to a classby-class election. But the results were disastrous. Only two Falange candidates were elected out of a slate of twenty.

Before the third-year law students could vote, the Falange ordered the elections to be suspended. To back up the order it sent a squad of its Blue Shirt toughs to rough up the dean and the leaders of the antiFalangist insurrection. The students took up the challenge, and fighting ensued. The next day the Falange marched a force of 500 Blue Shirts into the law school quadrangle. The police held back with orders not to intervene. On the third day the rioting got out of hand, firearms were used, and three students were seriously wounded. At this juncture the police leaped into action. Fifty individuals, not all of them students, were rounded up for questioning.

Franco acts

The following week, at his weekly cabinet ministers’ conference, General Franco suspended two articles in the Tucro los Espñoles, the Spanish bill of rights. Simultaneously he ousted the Falange’s Secretary General, Fernandez Cuesta, and the Minister of Education, Ruiz Jimenez, both of them stout Francoists who had not in any way been connected with the uprising. Changes also were made within the Falange and the University faculty. Among those dismissed wert’ Hector Lain Fnlralgo, Dean Torres, and three Falangist party bigwigs.

Tlu* press, carrying out the directives of the government, blamed the disorders on the Communists and fellow-traveling liberals of “antiSpain tendencies. Liberals, progressives, and assorted “devialionists of the National Movement “ were warned that social reformers const it tiled the “third order" of international Communism. But the state’s campaign to foist the blame on the Communists collapsed almost from the start, and trumped-up charges were dropped for lack of evidence.

The affair, however, was far from settled. In March and April a deluge of clandestinely circulated petitions, manifestoes, and leaflets engulfed Madrid which supported the original students’ petition and blamed the government for distorting the facts and camouflaging the truth. The climax came in late April when a group of four dissident young men who had been detained in March for circulating clandestine antigovernmenl propaganda ware tried by a civil court, found guilty, and sentenced to prison terms ranging from one year to six months. All four were members of the ruling upper middle class. One was a young diplomat from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, one a professor, and two were lawyers.

To the Spanish man in the street, to the bus driver, baker, and candlestick maker, this factional clash among the youthful members of the National Movement and the subsequent political trials were merely a family quarrel. For this politically impotent mass of Spaniards, which constitutes Spain’s great political unknown, are more concerned with keeping body and soul together than with the prevailing political structure of the nation.

Yet by the middle of April the bull fever of the students spread to restive indust rial workers. This time the trouble was economic rather than political. The nation’s simmering inflation had upset the closely calculated budgets of underpaid workers; and despite a 20 per cent wage hike in minimum basic salaries granted by the government on April 1, thousands of workers walked out in a series of wildcat strikes in northern Spain.

Economic resurgence

Spain’s “controlled” inflation is in large measure due to the government fiscal policies and to the impact of rapid industrial expansion on the economy. Agricultural production has risen 120 per cent over the levels of 1941—1951 but it is still below record high production of the republican mid-thirties. With an estimated increase in population of one million every three years, Spain has had to import an average of 100,000 to 150,000 tons of wheat annually. To make the nation agriculturally selfsufficient, the government has launched two large land-reclamation programs in Andalucía and Estramadura called “Plan Jaen” and “Plan Badajoz.” The Badajoz Plan, the larger of the two, is a miniature TVA. When completed it will have reclaimed 750,000 acres of heretofore unproductive land, at a cost of $160 million.

Despite this serious effort to increase agricultural production, Spain enjoys so little rainfall that today only half her population can earn its livelihood from the soil. Industry, therefore, must be expanded to the point where it will absorb the excess fa rm ing pop u 1 a ti on.

To stimulate industrial expansion, the government created some years back the Instil uto Nacional de Industria, a giant holding corporation capitalized at $240 million and growing at the rale of $100 million a year. Today INI has a direct interest in some fifty-seven manufacturing plants.

Its president, Juan Antonio Suanzes, estimates that Spanish industry must be prepared to absorb one million people from farm to factory within l he next ten years — a schedule calling for an investment of a half billion dollars in new plants and factories. INI has used government credit to stimulate production of steel, electric power, petroleum products, shipbuilding, automobiles, and coal. Its interests range from the deepest mines to the Iberian Air Lines Constellations that fly the Madrid-Havana-New York run. Last March the Spanish government announced an ambitious five-year $250 million housing plan that calls for construction of 500,000 housing units. This is the first time that such a major social project has been undertaken by any government in the history of Spain.

This economic resurgence is part and parcel of Spain’s new international ascendancy, which is due partly to General Franco’s inflexible opposition to Communism and partly to American military aid, which permitted Spain to spend for economic growth money that would otherwise have been needed for defense. Today, for ihe first time in 200 years, Spain is a genuine Mediterranean power. Franco’s selfish but intelligent action in Morocco in refusing to recognize the French deposition of Sultan Ben Yusscf has won Spain the good will not only of the Moroccans but also of the Arab nations of the Mediterranean at the expense of France.

For several years the attention of Madrid has been focused on the troublesome Mediterranean, and it is now clear that Spain is counting on American support in her bid to realize her fondest dream: the creation of an anti-Communist Mediterranean pact destined to supplant the fragile British-sponsored Baghdad Pact. W hether or not Spain can realize this dream will be determined by her internal stability in the coming years.