SPANISH SOCIALISTS IN POWER

...Even the best and the brightest are going to need all the good breaks they can get...

...only two are blue-collar workers...

...But uncertainty over what would happen after the death of Franco caused a postponement of any airing of doctrinal differences...

...Greater tactical flexibility was therefore proposed by the young people of Seville...

...Bureaucratization is an ever-present danger in all popular movements, but especially in one with a reduced membership base...

...The splintered forces of the right and center-right remain too engrossed in rebuilding their forces to provide a credible challenge...

...Accelerated industrial expansion and urbanization, starting in the late 1950s, catapulted the country into the 20th century...

...The country's belated modernization and industrialization prevented liberal bourgeois ideas from attaining the acceptance they have had in advanced societies...

...After five years of unrelieved decline in purchasing power, more of the same is anticipated...

...Most members of the Federal Committee (akin in concept to a "Central Committee") have entered the party since 1974...

...The PSOE was defined as "a class party and therefore a mass party, Marxist and democratic...

...The PSOE displayed a certain political acumen by projecting an image of "moderation...

...A new generation of Spaniards arose that was too young to have experienced the traumas of the Civil War...

...Gonzalez's redefinition of the party's outlook and his strengthening of the organization placed the PSOE in an advantageous position...

...In December 1976, when the PSOE's legal status was restored and its first congress was held in 117 Spain since the Civil War, the membership had doubled...

...Furthermore, the voter/member ratio, which stood at more than 500:1 before October 1982, since then has doubled to 1,000:1, a proportion hardly known in earlier European Socialist experience...

...On the eve of the 1977 elections it was claimed that the party had some 75,000 members, but 20,000 is closer to reality...

...So far, there has been a serious failure to attract politically conscious women to the party and especially to a place in the leadership...

...With little experience of living in an open society, the newly constituted parties and those emerging from illegality encountered great difficulty in establishing ideological and structural stability...

...And as support continued to steadily shift to the Socialists, quarreling and divisiveness intensified within the UCD...

...The Socialists, from their exile headquarters in Toulouse, France, had tried to revive their under116 ground organization inside Spain...

...On the eve of the 1977 elections Suarez pieced together the UCD, a crazy quilt of political groups...

...it's finding the right moment...

...If the PSOE somehow did not take office, the continuance of a weak government would once again encourage the military to try to reduce civilian authority to impotence...

...In 1979 both major parties underwent crucial tests...

...The transition to democracy began when King Juan Carlos named Adolfo Suarez, a middle-ranking Francoist politician, as prime minister...

...The success of PSOE moderation at the ballot box induced most of the membership to acquiesce in the gradualist reform strategy...

...In Spain, economic downturn coincided, after Franco's death, with a fragile return to popular rule...

...Despite occasional heavy-handedness and a tendency to concentrate decision-making at the top, the PSOE, nonetheless, remains the most democratic and open of all Spanish parties...

...The UCD began to fall apart while still in office, and by the October 1982 elections it had become a political corpse...

...On the leading committee, 11 out of 25 members are university professors and most of the others are professionals...

...An unprecedented parliamentary majority resulted: 202 of the Congress of Deputies' 350 seats and 134 of the Senate's 204 seats...

...Close to half its members have affiliated since 1977...

...In 1974 the party had only 4,000 members, equally divided between those in Spain and those in exile...

...The Italian party has 450,000 members, while the French Socialist party, never known for its large rank and file, claims twice as many members as its Iberian neighbor...

...Spaniards describe this kind of choice as being caught between the sword and the wall...

...More recently it has permitted an influx of former Franco supporters, former left-wing moderates of the UCD, increasing numbers of ex-Communists, and of some who had tried to establish groups on the extreme left...

...Symptomatic was an impetus in Seville in 1966 where Alfonso Guerra, now a prominent PSOE leader and deputy prime minister, assembled a Socialist youth group that included Felipe Gonzalez...

...but unemployment has risen to over 17 percent, Europe's highest...

...Once a large electoral constituency had been acquired, it was only a matter of time before the gap between rhetoric and reality would be narrowed...

...Effective policy formulation takes place within the government, and the party executive tends to follow up...

...Since then, moreover, under the discreet prodding of the Socialist government, military commanders have taken more forceful disciplinary measures against conspirators...

...The UCD was mired in its internal disputes...

...Fascist gangs sought to stoke discontent through violence in the streets and by encouraging military plotting against the parliamentary regime...

...He proceeded with a rapid "social democratization" of the party's orientation...

...By the thousands they thronged into the parties and independent trade unions...

...Some supporters of the government, however, show impatience with what they regard as excessive timidity in the pace and scope of reform...

...An industrial reconversion program has also been launched...

...It has the smallest membership of any comparable Socialist party in Western Europe...

...The foremost figures in the party, General Secretary Felipe Gonzalez and his imperious right arm, Alfonso Guerra, continue to retain their leading party functions while serving as prime minister and deputy prime minister...

...By 1948 the members of six successive underground executive committees had fallen into police hands...

...Still another knotty problem is the blurring that has taken place in the policy-making roles of the government executive and the party...

...But, concludes Jose Felix Tezanos, who has conducted a study of the PSOE, the new PSOE member "is quite similar to the `average Spaniard' and differs from older members in that politics is not the center of his life...

...For the remainder of that year and well into the next the precarious survival of the country's nascent democracy aroused deep apprehension...

...Some steps toward a larger scheme of reform have been taken...

...And Prime Minister Gonzalez, who also is the vicepresident of the Socialist International in charge of Latin American affairs, is increasingly involved in the search for a negotiated solution to the crisis in Central America...

...See my article in the Fall 1983 Dissent...

...The success or failure of the Socialist experiment hinges in large measure on the government's ability to cope with economic stagnation...

...This concentration of academicians and professionals has come about because many of the party's key figures first entered political life through the anti-Franco student rebellions of the '50s and '60s...

...Then, from the first post-Franco elections of June 1977, the PSOE emerged as the leading opposition party...

...The PSOE, which had received 5 million votes in 1979, this time got over 10 million votes...

...The UCD government, led by the uninspiring Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, became transfixed with fear at the possibility of another coup attempt, despite overwhelming popular support for continued democratic rule...

...The bulk of those who came in before 1977 tended to be activists with a relatively high ideological awareness...

...To a great extent, he joined the PSOE as an extension of his trade union commitment...

...After 37 years in exile and barely six years since rejoining political life at home, Spain's Socialist party (the PSOE—Socialist Workers' party) found itself catapulted into power by a landslide vote...

...Spain meanwhile was undergoing great social and economic changes...

...A rebuilding effort got under way when the PSOE had reached its nadir...

...Gonzalez and other members of the government continue faithfully to attend meetings of the PSOE committees, but their attendance amounts to what one insider has described as mimetismo (mimicry...

...It was a disastrous failure...

...By 1969 the Sevillians joined forces with party leaders in Bilbao, Madrid, and Asturias in an effort to persuade the Toulouse gerontocracy to give greater priority to reinvigorating the party inside the homeland and to transfer its headquarters back to Spain...

...The measures instituted thus far include reforms in the criminal justice system, a moderate strengthening of public education, and a restructuring of university standards and structures...

...And the PSOE sank even deeper into ineffectuality...

...The UCD proved to be useful in facilitating a smooth transference from authoritarian to popular rule, and especially in keeping Francoist hard-liners in check...

...It has been estimated that 30,000 to 35,000, including most party cadres, hold some sort of public position...

...By 1972 the "Renovators" succeeded in vanquishing the Llopis leadership that had run the party since 1944 (Llopis died this year at the age of 88...

...The real situation is actually much worse, for a large number of the women are influenced by family traditions or pressures...

...Internal divisions and recriminations led to its steady erosion...

...Now a concerted, though so far not very successful effort is under way to gain Spain's participation in European security and economic decision-making...

...The fact that half the members are post-1977 recruits has made it easier for the leadership to embrace a pragmatically moderate outlook...

...Nothing like it had ever happened in Spain...

...As for the depressed economy, it is simply too vulnerable and too dependent on the international economic system for substantive innovations...

...Deprived of the fulltime services of its most important members, the party's policy-making organs cannot function properly...

...The breakthrough of 1977 opened the flood gates...

...In general, this member is not very active or politically educated...

...It has become the country's most popularly based political force, but it has not succeeded in acquiring a membership base commensurate with its role in national affairs...

...Party Secretary Rudolfo Llopis and the leadership, all still from the Civil War era, then decided to refrain from any further major clandestine operations...

...The decisive margin of the Socialist victory and the abysmal showing by the extreme right (it lost its only deputy elected in 1979) forced the neofascist New Force (Fuerza Nueva) to disband...

...q 120...

...But in a country where many public enterprises operate inefficiently and are a heavy drain on the exchequer, and where more than 40 percent of the GNP comes from the public sector (legacies from the Franco era), further nationalizations would be inconsequential...

...In the early '80s, the specter of a Francoist resurgence led by military rightists had a muting effect on Spain's political life...

...This endeavor requires cutting away much of Spain's archaic social and political undergrowth...

...The Llopis leadership adamantly refused...

...We 119 can't go too fast or we'll provoke resistance from the right, and if we go too slow we'll lose popular support...

...There have been modest changes to permit abortion under restricted conditions, and the decriminalization of pot...

...Two years later, Felipe Gonzalez was named general secretary, and so the Sevillians became dominant within the party organization...

...The Socialists' first year in office has been largely devoted to recruitment and replacement of key personnel and to becoming more conversant with the responsibilities of governing...

...It was in these circumstances that military hardliners launched their putsch on February 23, 1981...

...Socialist rule for some time to come seems unassailable...

...they would have succeeded but for the forceful intervention of King Juan Carlos...

...the Communist party's early advantage had been dissipated by electoral reversals and the failure of its Eurocommunist strategy to co-opt the left-wing space within the political spectrum, as the Italian CP had done...

...its values were shaped by the new consumer society...

...Nonetheless, the national mood seems to be one of relief at finally having a government with the strength and will to govern...

...The Federal Executive Commission is therefore largely composed of that small group of intellectuals who entered the party in the '50s and '60s, while the larger Federal Committee is more heavily weighted with people who have come in since 1974, 118 especially the new generation of trade union leaders who constitute 55 percent of its membership...

...But when confronted with the task of governing, the resulting strains on the party's unity became intolerable...

...Though boasting that it has the support of the working class, the PSOE's leadership is overwhelmingly composed of middle-class intellectuals...

...At first, no single party attained a clear predominance...

...Though, by 1976, the leadership was showing signs of a developing sobriety, the party congress held that year continued to reflect radical views...

...Undeniably, substantive changes have taken place in the outlook of Spanish socialism, yet certain features persist...

...And three national secretaries, Javier Solana, Jose Maria Maravall, and Joaquin Almunia, serve as cabinet ministers but without relinquishing their party positions...

...A new industrial working class emerged whose earnings increased tenfold between 1950 and the early '70s...

...On the left, the Spanish CP has not yet ended its peregrinations in the wilderness...

...The PSOE's coming to power is a case of the right party at the right time...

...It was a contest of political wills that went well beyond differing views on strategy...

...A glaring deficiency is the small number of women in the party-9 percent of the membership...

...Indeed, the party inside Spain did not amount to more than several hundred members...

...this year inflation has been reduced by 2 percent, to the targeted 12 percent...

...But skepticism prevails concerning the government's ability to pull the country out of the economic trough and to deal with the abiding problem of the military...

...It's a question of rhythm, of maintaining a cruising speed without spurts...

...Government by popular consent therefore appeared to many Spaniards as an exciting novelty...

...On the Socialist side Felipe Gonzalez, the PSOE's charismatic general secretary, demonstrated his authority by decisively repelling attempts to preserve an exclusively Marxist stamp on the party's program...

...But most decisive was the PSOE's successful renewal of its leadership and outlook over the past decade...

...The distinctiveness of the PSOE's rebirth and Spain's laggard political culture have endowed the movement with certain special traits...

...This gave the Communists an opportunity to fill the vacuum in the opposition within Spain...

...It lacked a rank-and-file base but controlled the government machinery...

...Internal quarrels reduced the Spanish CP to a marginal, demoralized movement...

...A survey conducted at the outset of the democratic changeover, for example, revealed that 40 percent of the population believed the government was of no concern to them—but a matter for "those who ruled...

...Nevertheless, despite the belligerent language in party documents, nobody raised any objections to the exceedingly moderate platform adopted for the 1977 election campaign...

...In Madrid they formed part of "the Generation of the '50s and '60s," and in Andalusia the reorganized movement received a major impetus from a socialist youth group of the mid-'60s that initially consisted mostly of university students...

...Within a year, PSOE membership plunged to approximately 70,000 (left-wing leader Pablo Castellano insists it dropped to 37,000...

...professionals increased by twothirds between 1965 and 1968, the service sector by 51 percent, and white-collar workers by 49 percent...

...In Felipe Gonzalez it had a candidate for prime minister with extraordinary popular appeal, and it adroitly positioned itself to take advantage of its rivals' disarray...

...Although some unrest persists, there seems to be no more antigovernment plotting among the military...

...The tradition of doctrinal tolerance has been retained, and this has permitted the coexistence of diverse strands of socialist opinion in the party...

...But the difficulties cannot be overestimated...

...The situation that has developed is not so much the leadership's responsibility as it is the result of operating in a society in which political consciousness has not yet fully evolved and where bureaucratization is a deeply embedded characteristic...

...The primary concerns are over high unemployment and the government's inability, at least in the short run, to lower the jobless rate...

...It is no coincidence that the renaissance of Spain's Socialist movement started in the midst of the country's economic transformation...

...And the party's deeply disillusioning experience with the Spanish Communists (PCE) during the Civil War had created a state of mind that worked against any form of cooperation among the various anti-Franco groups...

...Disenchantment set in after the 1979 elections, and most organizations, especially on the left, experienced sharp drops in membership...

...Since this is the first time a Socialist government is in power since the 1930s— what with the still unconsolidated return to democracy and the severity of the economic crisis—few people question the need for a temperate course...

...The Socialists now faced difficult choices...

...Difficult times are ahead for wage-earners and trade unions...

...When we add the 36 percent of the membership lacking formal education and a further 6 percent who are illiterate, few remain who are sufficiently informed politically and free from institutional influences to be able to question party policies or strategies...

...This reflects the subservient role of women in Spanish society, especially outside the major urban centers...

...There is a feeling that the worst is over in the perilous return to democracy...

...Municipal and regional elections in May 1983 registered a comparable advance...

...The remarkable triumph of October 28, 1982 was mainly the result of the disintegration of the center-right UCD...

...As a result, ideological and regional fragmentation chronically afflict the ruling elite...

...Further progress on the transfer of powers from Madrid to the regional governments awaits the outcome of elections in the Basque country and Catalonia in the spring...

...it was, fundamentally, a generational conflict pitting the leaders who had survived the Civil War era against a new generation of rising young leaders...

...The problem of politics," responds Defense Minister Narcis Serra, "isn't finding the formula...

...The government's failure to counter the Basque ETA's systematic assassinations of army officers and of policemen had brought military resentments to a boiling point...

...This weakness of the democratic right has prevented it from assuming the leading role that center parties exercise in most democracies...

...Before there can be an expansion of the labor market and before wages can resume their upward course it is necessary, government people argue, to effect reductions in inflation and unit production costs so that Spanish products can be more competitive in foreign markets...

...The Socialist government is giving the highest priority to a solid anchoring of the democratic structure...

...During the early 1970s, this facilitated the incorporation of ex-anarcho-syndicalists, former POUMists, and even Trotskyists...

...Apart from a few isolated circles, the only surviving zones of Socialist influence were in the traditional strongholds of Asturias and Bilbao and in some groups in Valencia and parts of Andalusia...

...The legacy of 40 years of authoritarianism continues to be an obstacle to political modernization...

...The number of PSOE members who do not hold public posts or trade union offices or whose employment is not directly or indirectly dependent upon party affiliation is disquietingly small...

...No other Spanish party has adapted so well to post-Franco realities...

...But it was a shortlived enthusiasm...

...By 1981, the internal divisions that surfaced in the UCD and the government forced Adolfo Suarez to step down as prime minister...

...Within a year membership in the PSOE went over the 100,000 mark...

...Plainly, it was too much to expect a movement fresh out of clandestinity to shed an outlook shaped by years of dictatorship...

...A slight recuperation took place in late 1981, but membership levels remained well below 100,000 until very recently...

...Despite anxieties as election day neared, fears of preemptive actions by military Francoists proved to be unfounded...

...AntiFranco activities, which first had shown signs of strength in the 1950s, now acquired broader participation...

...The advent of the Cold War had crushed the hopes of anti-Franco parties that the Allied powers would help them to overthrow the Franco regime...

...The burgeoning urban centers of Bilbao, Madrid, Barcelona, Valladolid, Saragossa, Oviedo, and Valencia now contained a large modern middle class...

...Some measures involving a modest degree of income redistribution are being instituted...

...Before the advent of the Socialists, foreign policy played a minor role in national affairs...

...This is a problem without easy solutions...

...The Union of the Democratic Center (UCD), which had governed since 1977, was literally wiped off the political map, while the Communist party (PCE) plummeted from 13 to 4 percent of the vote...

...Among the socialist parties of southern Europe that have gained power in recent years none has displayed greater moderation than the PSOE, and the reasons for this are mainly the perceived special circumstances in today's Spanish society...

...Half a million industrial jobs have plans to reduce the work force in deficit-ridden, overmanned government-owned industrial plants are encountering stiff labor opposition, and uneasiness grows over the failure to suppress, thus far, Basque terrorist groups...

...The Francoist inheritance, the deficiencies in civic consciousness, the lackluster of conciliatory politics engaged in by all the parties to sustain the transition process, and the fact that the return to democracy took place in the midst of a deepening economic crisis—all this had a chilling effect on the political process...

...Were they to win the elections, wouldn't that trigger another coup...