SPAIN ON THE EVE

...The reform tendencies are fairly evident...

...While these figures are inflated (80,000 seems a more realistic figure), there is no reason to doubt that the CP now is the strongest among the opposition forces...

...His reform plans, which he has so far succeeded, though with modification, in imposing on the government, involve a precise time table...

...The new working class, slowly realizing its increasing specific weight, was no longer willing to put up with an industrial structure that precluded collective bargaining and the right to strike...

...The new cabinet marks the return to a measure of power for the Roman Catholic lay organization Opus Dei, led by the technocrats that engineered Spain's economic expansion in the 1960s...

...Neither Fraga nor his ally, Foreign Minister Areilza, were consulted or informed in advance of the change by the King, who seems intent to continue a reformist course, but one based on technocratic modernizers rather than on Machiavellian semiliberals...

...The King was dissatisfied with Arias's reluctance to embark on a decisive reformist course and wished to see the government headed by a younger and more dynamic prime minister...

...During the next six months we shall have these constitutional revisions adopted by the Cortez, and we will hold a referendum that will endorse the new democratic regime...

...the die will soon be cast one way or another...

...they have all been replaced by machines...

...In our interview I expressed some doubt that the major non-Communist opposition parties will sign up with the government and thus accept its legitimacy...

...At this time also, internal dissension became noticeable within the Commissiones...

...There is also the question of what is to happen to the enormous fortune— real estate and various assets—amassed by the official vertical unions, which, in whole or in part, under new, more democratic conditions would have to be handed over to the legitimate unions...

...If it is generally difficult, as one of the grand old men of Spanish socialism, Professor Enrique Tierno, once put it, "for antidemocrats to create democracy," it seems even more difficult for a man who seems temperamentally unsuited by his ingrained authoritarian bent to engage in the required politics of give and take...

...He is a brilliant intellectual of lowermiddleclass origins, a former professor of political science at the University of Madrid, the author of many books, a former minister of information in the '60s under Franco...

...Its main rival on the left, of course, is the Socialist Workers party (PSOE...

...Since the story of the students revolt is better known in the United States than that of the working-class movement, it will suffice here to say that the Spanish student movement, which emerged in the mid-'S0s after over 15 years of almost complete conformism in the universities, encompassed within a few years a major part, probably the majority, of the students...

...And, of course, large numbers of official dignitaries have been feeding at a public trough that would then be empty...

...the initial leading role of the Communist party now was being aggressively questioned by a variety of ultraleft splinter groups ranging from Maoists to Trotskyists to anarchists...

...But when its demands became less "professional" and more overtly political, repression again was intensified...

...The Communist party now was pushing for a more pronounced political role, while nonCommunist militants put the major emphasis on the shop-floor level...

...If truly democratic reforms should take place, about 15,000 employees in the official, sham unions would suddenly lose their jobs...

...But will it work...

...In contradistinction to the working-class and student sources of dissent, these largely professional middleclass strata were less inclined to follow the lead of the Communist party and strove instead to develop the bases for Socialist or Christian Democratic welfare-state politics...

...In 1960 only 19.1 percent of the population lived in cities of over 100,000...

...Such restitution of course would strengthen the clout of the organization considerably...

...But practically no one applauded as the tanks and armed carriers rode by and the jets roared overhead...

...Between 1968 and 1970 the government declared three states of emergency during which the police occupied the faculty buildings, dismissed professors, and arrested student leaders and other militants...

...After 1968, the government's tough line prevailed...

...The shop-floor representations progressively undermined the official, government-controlled, vertical trade unions, and from 1962 on new militant working-class leaders, emerging from the shop-steward committees, organized strike movements and other industrial actions that progressively undermined these official labor organizations...

...The proceedings of the congress have been printed and can easily be obtained...

...The Commissiones attempted with considerable success to build an autonomous union movement, making use of lower ranks in the official unions and of the shop-steward movement in order to build a grass-roots alternative to the official unions...

...The new minister of the interior, Martin-Villa, had previously been in charge of the official sham vertical trade unions, and the new minister of finance, Carriles Galarrago, is a director of a large insurance company and associated with a chain of conservative Catholic newspapers...

...It still maintains that it will not break with its CP partner until there are free elections, but it may change its mind...

...During the first six-month period that has now gone by, we established a dialogue with the various political tendencies and the opposition, and elaborated projects for the fundamental restructuring of the basic laws governing political parties, the right of assembly, elections to parliament and the like...

...The police must be informed 72 hours in advance before any meeting in a public hall can be held, and the police must be informed ten days in advance of any open air meetings...

...Even the employers turned increasingly to the workers' grass-roots organizations, since these—rather than the official unions that were largely empty shells—could serve as effective counterparts in collective-bargaining negotiations...

...The new government includes a number of skilled technicians but hardly any outstanding personalities capable of renewing the dialogue with the opposition...

...But how can the left accept such compromises at a time when right-wing thugs are beating up leftist militants in front of opposition bookstores, and when oppositionists are reminded every day of the origins of the present regime by being forced to reside or work in streets named after Franco's Civil War generals and other such worthies...

...Such new dailies as El Pais or the mass-circulation weekly Cambio 16 compare well with such distinguished European publications as Le Monde or l'Express...

...These figures may change very rapidly once the UGT begins a serious recruitment campaign...

...Such men seem hardly suited to inspire confidence in the opposition...

...1962 was also the year the most important new autonomous working-class organizations of the Franco era, the Commissiones Obreras (workers commissions), were formed —semilegal organizations, based on the legal shop-stewards committees and also on underground organizations...

...One can well understand why the opposition so far has categorically rejected this bundle of reforms, and why it has stated that, if these new laws are railroaded through the Cortez while the opposition platform is not even considered, they will advocate a complete "ruptura" between government and opposition...

...The rather faceless men who now dominate the cabinet may attempt to revive the economy, but it is hard to believe that they will manage the smooth transition to controlled democracy that Fraga had planned...

...The Spanish-American sociologist Juan Linz has created an apt neologism to characterize the present situation: political activities on the left are neither legal nor illegal, they are alegal, just as certain actions may be judged not to be moral or immoral but rather amoral...

...2. The opposition leader Rafael Calvo Serer, returning from exile in Paris, was arrested at the airport...

...Nobody knows as 345 yet whether major parts of the opposition will accept Fraga's proposals, though most serious observers think it unlikely...

...As a result, the political scene is now also fundamentally different from that of preFranco days...

...This divergent orientation is not merely the result of the UGT's fear of Communist domination on the local levels...

...The new law governing the right of assembly, it turns out, is hedged around with restrictions that make it almost meaningless...

...By the laws of dynastic succession not Juan Carlos but his father, Juan, who lives in exile in Portugal, should have assumed the throne...

...The reviewing stands for the top brass, the civilian and court officials were heavily protected by soldiers armed with submachine guns and by barbed wire...

...The British journals that carried Fraga's speech also printed the following items: 1. It was announced today that the prosecution has demanded a minimum sentence of 18 years for Senor Simon Sanchez Montero, who is awaiting trial on charges of belonging to the executive committee of the Spanish Communist Party...

...Most of the faces in the crowd seemed rigid and frozen, they evidently made an effort to control their emotions and to be on their guard—a cautious habit acquired over the many years of Franco's rule...

...the reconstituted Spanish Socialist Workers party, led by the able and astute Filipe Gonzales (the exiled remnants of the old Socialist party will soon return but are unlikely to become a major political factor and with the Popular Socialist party, a socialist splinter group, will soon join a united party led by Gonzales...

...These organizations soon infiltrated official student and faculty bodies, turning them into platforms for the opposition...

...A visit to the campus of the University of Madrid gave me a strong impression of deja vu...

...But will they...

...Though the following figures are by no means reliable, it seems reasonable to accept the estimate that the Commissiones have presently some 100,000 members (the CP claims that 344 they have 1 million), while the UGT's membership is probably below 10,000, and the Christian union's below 5,000...

...Alas, poor Fraga, his chances are not very brilliant...

...The old pretender, however, largely influenced by Christian Democratic advisers, is considerably to the left of the young King, who in turn is to the left of the 341 prime minister he has inherited from Franco...

...A leading opposition journalist said to me that the current situation, in which permission to hold or forbid meetings is at the discretion of various central, regional, and municipal authorities, is preferable to a situation that will no longer leave a certain amount of discretion up to the police but imposes rigid legal criteria that can no longer be circumvented...

...I conceive of the ways to democratization [he told me] in terms of six-month blocks of time...

...They will then advocate a nay vote on the constitutional referendum or, if nay votes are not allowed, mobilize the opposition forces in favor of massive abstentions...

...The Prime Minister will not be responsible to parliament and will be nominated by the King and chosen from a list submitted to him by the Council of the Realm, a body of ancient holdovers from Franco's regime...

...All accounts and public opinion polls indicate that oppositionist sentiment in Barcelona and the Basque country is considerably stronger even than in Madrid...

...Senor Suarez, backed by the military and the technocrats though intending to pursue reform, wishes above all to maintain stability...

...In the countryside too there has been considerable improvement, not because of agrarian reforms, but because the exodus of the rural population to the cities and to Western Europe has led to a relative scarcity of manpower, which has forced landowners to increase wages in order to attract labor...

...As I left I passed in his antechamber, though in a much less conspicuous place, a smaller photograph of Franco...

...At first, the Commissiones Obreras were granted a degree of recognition, but soon repression was intensified...

...The crowd wasn't overtly hostile either...

...While a master of what he likes to call the "politics of the possible," he seems to be not sufficiently aware of the moral and intellectual passions that mark a major part of the human equation, perhaps even more pronouncedly in Spain than elsewhere...

...Political rumors in Madrid have it that Socialist party representatives have informally contacted government officials to find out what subsidies would be flowing their way if they agreed to become a legal party with the right to financial support from the government in electoral battles...

...finally, the Communist party, under its Italian-style leader Santiago Carrillo, and the Commissiones Obreras, led by the powerful Communist leader Marcelino Camacho...

...I cannot help but attribute some symbolic significance to this fact of economic development...

...But the old pretender was much too liberal to lend himself to Franco's entreaties, though he did not oppose, while still maintaining his dynastic rights, his son's assumption to the throne...

...How can leftists possibly trust a government that makes concessions one day but gives no guarantee that it may not again countermand them tomorrow...

...In 1936 Madrid had a population of 1 million...

...Senor Sanchez Montero was arrested after a meeting at one of Madrid's three universities earlier this year...

...Some of them are allowed to meet, while others will be arrested for "illegal" meetings...

...but that demise seems nevertheless inevitable...

...Senor Fraga is an impressive figure, sutely the dominating personality in the present regime...

...So far, only a few small towns have dared to rename their streets...

...Nobody, by the way, predicts, in the foreseeable future, a Popular Front government in Spain or the CP's participation in government...

...Finally, elections to the Cortez will be held during the third six-month period...

...In the pre-Franco era only Catalonia and the Basque country had enough of a middle class to count as a major element in the political and social balance...

...These journalists argue that the reforms instituted so far have been accepted, although with distaste, by the right because they do not seriously threaten its vested interests...

...There are also a variety of social democratic parties who advocate a kind of laborite, Swedish-style politics but seem to have relatively small followings...

...Someone who had watched the same type of people the night before at the bullfight exploding in emotional outbursts knew well that on this occasion the Madrilenos felt it not yet safe to discard their masks...

...Rather than to rewrite the report, I prefer to let it stand as is, and have added a postscript assessing the new situation.—L...

...Linking political demands for democracy and autonomy with concrete claims and negotiations on the shop floor, the Commissiones Obreras have ever since been the decisive element in the workers' struggle, not only against management but against the regime as a whole...

...Granted that the government desperately wants to enter the Common Market and NATO as well as other international organizations from which Franco Spain was excluded, and that it therefore desires to end the beastly conduct that was the norm during Franco's regime...

...Even more unwilling than the previous government to make a clean break with the past, Senor Suarez's men may soon be faced with an explosive situation that technical experts are ill equipped to deal with...

...Anarchism seems to have almost disappeared and is no longer a major political force...

...the various regional opposition parties...

...The present government is made up of a motley crew, some ministers belonging to the camp of diehards the Spanish call the Bunker, others having ties to the major industrial interests, and still others are taking Fraga's lead and working toward a kind of "managed" democratic solution that seems largely to coincide with the wishes of the young King...

...You can corrupt and bribe some oppositionists some of the time, but you can hardly succeed in corrupting and bribing all of them all the time...

...In fact, some well-informed, responsible journalists believe that Fraga will have to withdraw some of his "liberal" concessions under the renewed pressure of the right wing within the government and the army...

...The regime at first showed a measure of flexibility...

...The old socialist trade union movement, the UGT, was recently allowed to hold its first congress since the Civil War, which was attended by a number of trade union representatives from abroad as well as by foreign socialist leaders...

...A few preliminary observations: Spain is no longer the backward, largely agricultural country of the pre-Civil War republic or the first two decades of Franco's regime...

...Throughout the early part of that year, large strike movements developed in the metallurgical, coal-mining, chemical, ship-building, and electrical industries of Catalonia, the Basque country, and the other industrial regions of Spain, culminating in a general strike in the Asturia mines that lasted from July to September of that year...

...There was even an announcement of a forthcoming lecture by the Socialist Workers party candidate for president of the United States, who must have thought that he would get a better audience among the students of Madrid than the workers of Detroit...

...These large-scale industrial conflicts made it impossible for the regime to continue to define strikes as acts of sedition, cleared the way for the legalization of "professional" strikes and resulted in a cumbersome mechanism for compulsory arbitration and mediation set up by the Ministry of Labor...

...Yet Filipe Gonzalez, the leader of the Socialists, has recently made some rather cryptic statements indicating that he might be amenable to some compromise...

...In his strongest statement so far, in the early days of June, Fraga called for a pact between government and opposition...

...The proportion of the active population in I wish to thank Professor Jose M. Maravall of the University of Madrid for the many important guidelines to the intricacies of Spanish politics he provided for me during my visit...

...the Supreme Court pronounced the Commissiones illegal and put an end to their quasipublic activities...

...In addition, nuclei of opposition emerged among professors, journalists, liberal churchmen, and other professionals who openly began to question the legitimacy of the regime and strove for basic democratization...

...He is soon to see Fraga and will probably also be granted an audience with the King...

...Yet the most important, predominantly socialist discussion magazine Cuadernos Por El Dialogo,which recently planned to carry a major report entitled "Terror in Spain," was told by the police that it would be seized and the editors brought before a military tribunal if they did not withdraw the report—they did...

...Fraga's main political aim is, of course, to fragment the opposition, and I am not altogether sure that he will fail in this, although his chances are presently rather slim...

...Early in July, the King dismissed the previous Prime Minister, and the new Prime Minister's cabinet did not include Sen"or Fraga and other key reformists whose orientation I discuss...

...The bulletin boards announcing meetings, from the women's liberation front to a bewildering variety of revolutionary groups, are reminiscent of the American campus in the late '60s...

...it now has 4 million...

...Largescale demonstrations in the late '50s were followed in the early '60s by the creation of 340 clandestine organizations involving large numbers of students...

...Franco's "Organic State," with its corporatist structure and its vertical syndicates encompassing workers and management in a single organization under the overall guidance of the government, had corresponded, to some degree, to a relatively stagnant economy, autarchic in orientation...

...Though he emphatically denies it, Fraga plays a game of divide and rule when it comes to the opposition forces— favoring some and neglecting others, handing out permission to publish or to meet to certain political organizations while holding others in check, arresting some leaders one day, only to invite them to meet with him soon after their release...

...Not a good indication of a desire for national reconciliation...

...agriculture fell from 42 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 1971...

...The roots of this major change are complex...

...That would postpone the demise of the refurbished Old Regime...

...Besides, it is hardly a secret, despite various public statements, that the Socialist leadership is not kindly disposed toward its Communist counterpart...

...The rapid economic development of the late'50s and the '60s—largely put in motion by new technocratic elements in management who wished to develop mass production and hankered after export outlets and integration into the Common Market—could no longer be contained within the authoritarian framework of the old regime...

...Early in July, King Juan Carlos dismissed the cabinet headed by the Franco holdover Carlos Arias Navarro and appointed the 43year-old Adolfo Suarez Gonzalez as prime minister...

...As long as the CP is in control of the Commissiones Obreras and as long as the Socialist leadership of the UGT is not making major inroads in the Commissiones, the CP will have strong roots in the reborn labor movement as well as in other local organizations...

...I am here to disprove this contention...

...Next to the industrial scene, the other major source of active dissent and concrete action against the regime from the late '50s onward was the university...

...In a number of strikes in the most recent period, nonCommunist leaders have spontaneously risen on local levels whenever it was felt that the Communists were more concerned with overall political strategy than with concrete, immediate gains...

...Just as the Black Death of the Middle Ages changed the rural social structure through the resulting labor shortage, so emigration and huge population movements into the growing cities raised the price that those remaining in the countryside could command...

...He and his government will have to steer a middle course, just like his predecessors, but it seems likely that he will proceed with more caution and hesitation when it comes to the demands of the opposition...

...The Democratic Coordination includes for the moment all major opposition forces: the Christian Democrats under the leadership of the old fox from pre-Franco days, Gil Robles, and of the highly respected law professor Ruiz-Gimenez...

...Even more important, instead of an urban industrial working class 338 still largely tied to its rural roots, Spain now has a huge industrial labor force similar to that of older industrial countries...

...A reconstituted, legal UGT could lay claim to its considerable old holdings, mainly in real estate but also in newspaper presses and the like, which were confiscated by the Franco regime...

...Even the anarchist CNT union was recently allowed to meet in congress in Madrid—obviously for very similar reasons...

...The Prime Minister has announced that he will revive the stalled program of reforms, but it is rather unclear how he will manage this, especially since the five former ministers closely associated with that program were excluded from the new cabinet...

...These same tensions between SP and CP also exist in the trade union sphere...

...Ever since the beginning of the rapid industrial upsurge of the late '50s and early '60s, it has been apparent that the creaky structure of Franco's authoritarian state was no longer able to hold in check the new forces released by this industrial development, and that the old institutional framework could no longer cope with modernization and development...

...A completely new Madrid has emerged in the north of the ancient capital where there were only wheatfields 20 years ago...

...I hear though that the King was warmly applauded...

...It stands to reason that such a law will allow the police almost complete leeway to do as 342 they please...

...Writers of the opposition can express themselves in the press provided they do not transcend certain arbitrary limits set by the government...

...Still, the first impression one gets of the Madrid press is one of almost complete freedom of expression...

...The CP claims 150,000 members for itself and presently is conducting a membership drive to reach 300,000...

...While some 343 of their leaders, like the sociologist Gonzalez Seara who now directs the most important and lively opposition weekly Cambio 16, are respected left-wing politicians, others, like Garcia Lopez, seem to have rather close connections with American interests—and I don't mean American socialist interests...

...One of the respected right-wing socialist leaders, Antonia Gracia Trevijano, whom I intended to see, turned out to be in prison while a number of Communists such as Marcelino Camacho, the leader of the Commissiones Obreras, with whom Trevijano was arrested, had been released...

...The Spanish Bourbons do not wish to emulate their French cousins of the 19th century who, upon their return from exile after the fall of Napoleon, were said to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing: the Spanish Bourbons want to push for a large measure of democratization...

...Now glittering high-rise commercial and apartment buildings dominate the skyline there, and I have never seen as many sumptuous bank buildings as in this area of the city...

...But the right-wing opposition will be strongly reinforced when it comes to reforms that attack the vested interests of all those who have links with the old regime...

...the CP will not be recognized for the time being— although Fraga says vaguely that they might be recognized in another year or two...

...By contrast, the Commissiones Obreras will not be allowed to meet...

...He faces a seven-year sentence for an article he published in Le Monde in 1971...

...One gets the impression that Fragawho seems to pride himself on his manipulative skills, his Machiavellian ability to play both ends against the middle—thinks, in the last analysis, in rather too mechanical terms...

...But this controlled institutional change soon proved unable to stay the wave of industrial grievance and discontent...

...In late May, I watched the army's yearly Victory Parade in celebration of Franco's Civil War victory over the Republic...

...Suarez has enacted a large-scale amnesty, but it is still not certain who will be included...

...But whether and when such a development comes to pass depends on a number of specific political developments...

...In the last years of Franco's regime, the government's policies on the industrial scene were characteristically vacillating...

...This might well symbolize the present political climate in Spain...

...I watched one of them for half an hour—he sold a total of two copies...

...Not only the general student culture, but the kinds of books sold in the bookstore, ranging from Marxist classics to New Left thinkers from Marcuse to Poulantsas, from Gramsci to Habermas and Althusser, remind one of home...

...The annual growth of per capita income between 1960 and 1966 was 7.5 percent...

...There may still be a referendum later this year and elections next year, but the likelihood of this is now slimmer than it was previously...

...A managed election according to the Fraga recipe might give very different results...

...Socioeconomic imbalances and deepseated strains and fissures developed rapidly, for the Franco regime proved unable to synchronize economic growth and political immobility...

...Neither King Juan Carlos nor anybody else in presentday Spain can afford to neglect the desires of the army...

...Such a situation can plainly not last for very long...

...How can they rely on a government that refuses total amnesty and the return of all exiles, and continues to deny elementary democratic liberties that are taken for granted elsewhere...

...I have no membership figures for the PSOE, but all observers agree that if free elections were held today, its share of the vote would be around 30 percent—again quite similar to the election results in Portugal...

...The deeper reasons for the King's choice are obscure, but it seems clear that the army had become worried by the increasingly liberal rhetoric in Fraga's camp in general and in August 20 particular by hints that the Communist party might be legalized in a year or two...

...They are likely to temporize, to maneuver, and to postpone the day of reckoning as much as they can...

...There now is a solid structural foundation for a democratic regime with a left-of-center welfare-state orientation based on the working class and the new middle class...

...Soon the Commissiones Obreras took the lead in industrial conflicts and collective bargaining...

...348...

...The fundamental law permitting all parties (except the Communists) to have a legal existence is similarly hedged around with so many conditions and restrictions that it is hard to conceive how such parties could maintain their autonomy...

...Since the Christian Democrats are also quite well entrenched in the middle classes, and since the regional parties are likely to gain large majorities in their regions, it is reasonable to predict that the opposition would easily carry a majority if free elections were held today...

...Much of what now happens on the political scene has indeed a surrealist flavor, partly because the various authorities, now that they are no longer under the firm guidance of Franco, often fail to act in unison and follow individual whims and particularistic policies, but also because the regime plays the game of cat and mouse with considerable deliberation in order to soften up the opposition...

...The regime also allowed the creation of jurados de empresa,a form of shop-steward committees, on the factory level...

...In addition, the police must be persuaded that none of the organizers, speakers, and leaders of the meeting have been condemned for previous participation in "nonpacific" meetings, and that public order and traffic on public streets will not be perturbed...

...The liberal El Pais, by contrast, sells some 70,000 copies in Madrid, and the liberal-socialist weekly Cambio 16 sells some 400,000 copies in all of Spain...

...Thus institutions created by the regime in order to alleviate tensions helped amplify 339 them...

...These interests had become alarmed in recent months by the deteriorating economic situation and also by 347 the thought that the Fraga wing might make too many concessions to the left...

...In addition, the new middle class now can provide a solid base for parties of the center, be they of Christian Democratic or anticlerical liberal coloration, and the labor movement too has a considerably enlarged social base from which to operate...

...He plays cat and mouse with his adversaries, hoping to demoralize them and soften them up so that they will sign on the dotted line provided by government legislation...

...There is also the possibility that the regime might be willing to buy off a loyal opposition with an offer of a few ministerial positions—though surely not with major ones...

...But the strength of the party cannot be assessed merely in terms of votes...

...Granted that the government wishes to engage in an experiment of managed and controlled democracy—but it certainly will have to pay a much higher price for an accommodation with the opposition than it is so far willing to pay...

...The Commissiones' top leadership is clearly tied to the Communist party, yet the CF has not succeeded in gaining full control among them...

...By the late 'SOs, collective bargaining was again legalized...

...In 1965 a new organization of students, the Sindicato Democratico de Estudiantes, was set up as a kind of counterpart of the Commissiones Obreras...

...For a few years thereafter recruitment into the democratic student movement was carried on quite openly...

...In the meantime sharp internal dissensions had developed within the student syndicate...

...These movements were striving for regional autonomy and the removal of the oppressive hand of the central authorities as well as for general democratization...

...They offended the army as well as major financial and business interests, and they failed to convince the opposition to back them in exchange for meager concessions...

...By the way, neither there nor anywhere else in the city do you find the shoeshine boys who used to dominate the street scene...

...by 1965 this percentage had risen to 32.7 percent, and it is now higher than that in Sweden...

...After Franco's death last November, the Law of Succession that he had put onto the statute books allowed a smooth transition to the new monarchical regime headed by the young King Juan Carlos, who had been carefully groomed to continue the regime...

...True, a first chamber of the parliament, the Cortez, will be elected by universal suffrage if the present reforms are enacted, but a second chamber will be constituted, as the present Cortez is, of members of various "corporations," from trade unions to management, from university rectors to pharmacists' representatives...

...This succession allows a first glimpse at the many paradoxes that mark the Spanish scene...

...and "Political Socialization and Political Dissent: Spanish Radical Students, 19551970," in Sociology, January 1976...

...As I hinted in my original report, the Fraga wing has proved to be, as the English say, too clever by half...

...Fraga responded, with a contemptuous gesture, "They will rush to the office of registration the minute we open up the registration windows...

...But, at the moment, concrete discussions of these issues are premature...

...Urbanization was rapid and extensive...

...How long will he be able to maintain his tightrope act, especially during a time of severe depression, high unemployment, and a rate of inflation (4.58 percent per month in May) that is among the highest in Europe...

...The Communist leaders of the Commissiones Obreras aim toward a unified trade union movement, built upon their base in the Commissiones...

...But the man he chose is not a liberal but a .long-time Francoist official who up till now oversaw the only legal party, the National Movement...

...The meeting will be authorized only if, among other conditions, it is judged not to have "illicit or indeterminate (indeterminado) aims," and only if the police are satisfied that "the meeting will not lead to infringements on the penal laws...

...Some hardy souls have suggested that it might be a good idea to give this annual parade some new neutral name, such as Armed Forces Parade—but the regime, while calling for "historical compromises," so far has not been willing to make even this simple compromise...

...Ortega y Gasset," he told me, "once wrote a famous essay in which he argued that one could be an intellectual or a politician, but never both...

...Let me give a few examples of the kind of controlled democracy that the laws now being passed would allow...

...During the last decade of Franco's regime, the working-class movement and the students provided the major bases of antiregime organization, yet there also emerged largescale opposition movements in Catalonia and the Basque country (in the latter, backed by a successful terrorist organization, the ETA...

...Journalists told me that an abstention rate of 20 percent could be taken in its stride by the government, but that an abstention rate of around 40 percent— which seems likely—would bring forth a governmental crisis or, perhaps, a crisis of the whole regime...

...But they hope to split it and to induce the nonCommunists to accept the projected constitutional arrangements in the hope of wider concessions later on...

...All these opposition forces function for the time being in a kind of no man's land, a twilight zone not legal but no longer obviously illegal...

...On balance, it seems most likely that the bulk of the opposition will remain united, rejecting the regime's entreaties and opting for a long-range strategy that would take advantage of all the openings it can find, and hoping that after a period of militant opposition and autonomous action it will finally be able to impose its own terms on the regime...

...There were still some remnants of the old socialist and anarchist union organizations as well as of other clandestine Communistsupported unions in the '50s and early '60s, but not until 1962 was the Spanish labor movement truly reborn...

...Arriba,by the way, sells some 3,000 copies a day in Madrid, and that includes the numerous official subscriptions...

...Fraga's attitude on democratic political parties seems to resemble that of the Spanish police to prostitution: these are inherently rather disgusting phenomena, but, people being what they are, it is preferable to allow them a legal existence under drastic controls rather than letting them fester underground...

...Yet despite government repression and these internal struggles, the Commissiones Obreras remain to this day the most important grass-roots organization of the working class...

...These men are closely tied to major industrial and banking interests, notably the Banco Espanol de Credito, the largest in the country...

...Senor Fraga, the minister of the interior, in turn is much more inclined to reform than the prime minister under whom he serves...

...q Postscript MY EARLIER skeptical view of the chances of the Fraga orientation proved only too valid...

...It all sounds very convincing, very methodical, and very efficient...

...But, of course, precisely for that reason there will be no free elections...

...C. When Senor Manuel Fraga Iribarne, then the Minister of the Interior, intellectual fountainhead and strongman of the Spanish government's "reformist" wing, received me in his office, I could not fail to note the huge portrait of the young King over his desk...

...If official journals now operating on government subsidies would be forced to close down, there would be hundreds of unemployed right-wing journalists...

...He has been imprisoned twice before for his political activities—once in 1945 for 14 years and then in 1959 for 20 years...

...Some of the fruits of the amazing industrial growth of the '60s have seeped down to that working class...

...The student syndicate was dissolved in 1969, but student opposition movements of various shades continue to dominate the universities and keep them in a perpetual state of political agitation and antiregime activities...

...The UGT now clearly has the government's approval: Minister of the Interior Fraga believes that, though the UGT still is relatively weak, it might in the future become a major competitor of the CPdominated Commissiones Obreras...

...The UGT/Socialist party leadership, on the other hand, argues for parallel unions: they envisage the Commissiones Obreras, the UGT, the Christian unions, and perhaps also the anarchist CNT linked by shared, concrete plans of action and programs of revendication...

...They envisage unified local unions, though they are willing to concede representation for the different tendencies in the directive organs of industrial unions and the whole union confederation...

...People lined the Paseo Castiliana, one of 346 Madrid's major thoroughfares, four and five lines deep...

...As with the press, so with all other forms of opposition: they are neither legal nor formally illegal...

...They were joined by workers with a variety of political orientations, but the Communists clearly were predominant among them, and from then on the Commissions Obreras constituted the major basis for the Communist party's political activity...

...I am also much in his debt for the insights provided by two of his papers: "Modernization, Authoritarianism, and the Growth of Working-Class Dissent: The Case of Spain," in Government and Opposition, Autumn 1973...

...Workers now were no longer willing to let wages and working conditions be dictated by the Ministry of Labor's official regulations and so began to turn to illegal industrial action...

...Its adherents are devoted, disciplined, well-trained, and bathe in the glory of the long and sustained labor struggles they have led in the recent past...

...Most knowledgeable observers maintain that, if free elections were held today, the Communist party would gather between 10 and 15 percent of the vote—roughly the same proportion as in the recent Portuguese elections...

...Fraga and his followers are, of course, aware that the opposition, presently united in the Democratic Coordination movement, is sharply opposed to the present reforms...

...Fraga exudes self-confidence and dynamic energies, and he obviously loves the smell of power...

...All along the reviewing stands newspaper vendors tried to peddle the Fascist newspaper Arriba...

...Moreover, the first chamber will be almost entirely restricted to passing on the budget, whereas both chambers will have to concur on everything else...

...It is hard to see how the non-Communist opposition could accept Fraga's present terms, and it has just now (June 3) affirmed its united rejection of Fraga's plans...

...The official reformist spokesmen proclaim over and over that Spain will now enter an era of democracy, yet Franco's authoritarian heritage, like a huge mortgage, still weighs down all attempts at reform...

...The new cabinet does not include Fraga or any of his cothinkers...

...The police must be appraised of, among others, the object of the meeting, its length, the agenda, the names and addresses of those who are calling the meeting and intend running it...

...What then is the present constellation of forces, and how will it develop in the near future...

...This means that any future democratic regime would no longer have to reckon with the heavy liability of a significant part of the population refusing to participate in the country's democratic and parliamentary political process...

...now this class is a major factor in all of Spain...

...He argued that both sides would have to accept "historical compromises and fundamental agreements," and that "the Spanish people do not want to become cannon fodder in another revolutionary experiment...

...The Spanish middle class, which had very little specific weight during the years of the Republic, has now expanded considerably...