Spain: Democracy With Difficulties

...In the wake of this defeat the Stalinist tendency began stirring...

...In the context of European socialism Gonzalez is on the left-center...

...They aren't...

...Value-heavy distinctions between the fine, popular and traditional arts are beginning to dissolve in Spain...

...The left had more difficulty rebutting PSOE's economic arguments for NATO membership...

...But by then Spain's economic and foreign policies had already been shaped and the party had little to do but discuss nuts, bolts, and peripheral issues...

...The Left Socialists were quickly brought back into the fold and given a few positions of leadership...

...Then in June 1986 Suarez and his Social and Democratic Center, a new party he formed in 1981, emerged on the political scene, running a populist campaign that, from "the left," attacked Gonzalez's foreign policy and the "warlocks" that control Spain's seven largest banks...

...Redondo has found reason for optimism...

...A neutral Spain, they argued, would have greater influence in Europe than a Spain tied to a U.S.-dominated NATO...

...REDONDO IS ALSO ENCOURAGED by a new leftist trend within PSOE...

...PCE, which had stayed united under the fascist boot, now splintered into three parties: the Stalinists, who formed the Spanish Peoples Communist Party...

...This monarch, cleverly defying rightist expectations, appointed liberal Franco politicians to a transitional government that he charged with drawing up a democratic constitution...

...The Spanish Communist party, that beacon of Eurocommunism, led the rebellion against the Franco dictatorship...

...In the litany on "the decline of Europe" you would expect Spanish voices to be among the loudest...

...PCE moved toward the center with policies that paralleled PSOE's...

...The center's decline was due in part to the loss of Suarez, who resigned from the presidency in January 1981, a month before the only crisis the new democratic Spain has faced—an attempted coup dltat by a cabal of fascist generals...

...The stability of Spain's Socialists inspires envy on the European left...

...He believes that PSOE will change its economic policies because the party's economic experts get their inspiration from the International Monetary Fund (IMF...

...The world of art and letters in Spain is traditionally the domain of the middle class...

...During the early 1970s and the turbulent transitional years, the PCE, commanding a sizable following, flourished under the witty and egotistical old fox, party leader Santiago Carrillo...

...Spain's forty-four year-old president shares nothing with Thatcher, Kohl, Chirac, or Reagan...

...Others say that la movida is largely peopled by the employed, and for that reason Spanish workplaces move slowly in the morning...

...intervention...

...Ideology divides the country like no other in Europe...

...Gonzalez argued that Spain would act as a progressive force within NATO, a view endorsed by Willy Brandt and indirectly supported by a much-publicized Wall Street Journal editorial that rejected Spain's conditions for continued NATO membership...

...The reasoning was that the one-third of PSOE supporters who in March had voted against NATO, rejecting the advice of their party, would in October be preoccupied with new worries and feel more disposed to mark a Socialist ballot...

...WHEN YOU GO BY THE PUERTA DE ALCALA, eighteenthcentury Madrid's monumental gate built by Carlos III, you can still see the scars left by bullets during the Fall of Madrid in March 1939...

...Spaniards returned the young socialists (the average age of the fifteen men in Gonzalez's new cabinet is forty-three) to a second-year term in office in June 1986, this time with a plurality of 44 percent...

...Providing jobs and halting political violence pose seemingly insurmountable problems...

...Early in 1985 the IMF said, for the first time, that the liberal economic solutions of the United States cannot automatically be translated to a European context since Europe would not be able to withstand—politically or economically— the resulting increase in unemployment...

...Champagne sold out in Madrid...

...The pitted granite remains—a quiet memorial to a civil war that killed 700,000 people and inaugurated thirty-seven years of fascist rule...

...In 1982 Gonzalez the candidate was anti-Atlanticist, promising that the Spanish people would decide by referendum whether to stay in NATO...

...Faith in the future unites the country with an infectious, if darkly Spanish, optimism...

...164 Spain is currently involved in eight joint weapon ventures with other NATO members...

...His best friend and mentor within the Socialist International was Olof Palme...

...In 1986 Gonzalez the president was the political realist saying that he too understood the desire for peace motivating the opponents of NATO, but...

...Antonio Gala, an immensely popular playwright who is openly gay—a fact given no mention in the Spanish press—was the official spokesperson for the anti-NATO campaign...

...As a legal political party, however, PCE failed to broaden its base of support...

...global intentions— they were not going to vote their future to PCE's oddball coalition in which unrepentant Stalinists cohabitated with an obscure neo-Carlist (monarchist) sect...

...The Stalinists abandoned him, and the Eurocommunists expelled him from the party in 1985...

...Museums are free and tickets for the performing arts— all subsidized—are cheap...

...The Retiro now has four public pavilions whose exhibitions in the past have included subjects such as modern British art, the history of the Inquisition (formerly a taboo subject), rare tropical birds and, recently, scale models of Madrid's public plaza reconstruction projects that help explain the chaos people find as they try to travel across town...

...At PSOE's 1974 biennial congress in Suresnes, France, a group of young socialists under the leadership of the current party president, Felipe Gonzilez, deposed their hidebound elders—aged Republicans who had spent the Franco years refighting old battles...

...The poster had no words, just the fist and rose emblem on a kite soaring in the blue sky...

...This dusk-to-dawn revelry of la movida is not beyond criticism...

...While domestic policy and foreign strategy divide party and nation, new Spain is united by—and 165 now noted for—its quality of public life...

...And thanks to la movida the street is where everyone wants to be...

...The Left Socialists opposed these shifts but were ignored...

...PSOE's left critics can further be countered by saying that they started their political careers by fighting fascism and, like the right, have not psychologically adapted to the staid politics of the new democracy...

...However, Spain's troubles are offset by a richness of public life, born of tradition and nursed on socialist government policy, that has made new Spain a cultural hub of Europe...

...When the weather is warm the terrazas (outdoor cafés) overflow with folks spending their nonworking hours in the company of friends and surrounded by strangers with whom they share the merriment or outrage at whatever spectacle breaks into the night...

...In the left-leaning El Pais, Spain's largest paper, the culture pages follow the political news and regularly outnumber both sports and the economy and labor sections...

...Heroin has spawned a bloodless crime wave by desperate, often apologetic, unemployed youth...

...Spaniards also feared direct economic retaliation by the United States...

...Opposite the editorial page, instead of the thoughts of packaged pundits, are essays by Spanish and Latin American intellectuals...

...The unions, goes this PSOE reasoning, should turn their attention to the new industrial relations that the new technology demands and work on providing services for their affiliated workers...

...The lefts in France, Great Britain, and Germany have in recent years helped elect socialists to office and then watched their governments shuffle off their campaign platforms, tilt towards the center and finally topple back into opposition...

...The rebellion collapsed...

...Gonzalez had said that Spain would enter NATO only on condition that there be no nuclear arms on Spanish territory, the U.S...

...Furthermore, many PSOE activists, though they may hem and haw on a few issues like NATO, strongly defend the party's piecemeal approach as the only strategy that can bring lasting change to a country that until ten years ago was politically fascist and economically corrupt and inefficient...

...Since the Civil War, Spain's artists and intellectuals have been active in left politics...

...He said Europe is a community of neighbors and neighbors have an obligation to provide for a common defense...

...During the years of transition, PSOE presented itself as the palatable left alternative to a nation nursed on the fear of communism...

...The la movida in Galicia, the rural Celtic province in the northeast, is now known for its avant-garde fashion and modern music...

...But now, as a matter of public policy, the arts in Spain are accessible to everyone, unflaggingly promoted and consequently less and less confined to the highly educated...

...Since the first post-Franco election in 1977, the Union of the Democratic Center (UCD), in coalition with the Liberal party, had governed Spain...

...That scene has become more real than anyone expected...

...The governing Socialists claim in response that both the UGT and Spain's Communist and largest union, Workers Commissions (CCOO), haven't really confronted the current economic crisis...

...As it turned out, though the left public would follow PCE's lead on issues of the heart—and nothing for Spain's left is more heartfelt than distrust of U.S...

...Redondo also abstained from endorsing PSOE's position on NATO...

...PCE's electoral plan was to gain a significant parliamentary minority through its coalition United Left (Izquierda Unida), which included the Stalinists but not Carrillo...

...The Socialist party under the "young professionals," as the new leaders were soon termed, portrayed itself as modernization incarnate...

...The Socialists' cultural policies have been an undisputed success...

...Tejero was jailed and the responsible generals put to pasture...

...They were excluded from positions of party leadership and allotted no seats in the Cones...

...troop presence be reduced, and Spain would, like France, hold political, not military, membership...

...Attacks from the Right, Splintering on the Left WHAT SIZABLE OPPOSITION there is to PSOE comes from the right in the form of a coalition of parties, CoaliciOn Popular...

...Soon, goes this argument, Spain will be full of successful Socialists reading adult comics on the subway...

...Spain had a taste of that in 1984 when the Department of Defense opted to buy a new, untested British transport plane instead of the well-clocked Spanish Avicor, an unexpected decision that followed President Gonzalez's much publicized embrace of Fidel Castro during the Cuban leader's state visit to Spain...

...This night scene is repeated throughout Spain, though to a lesser extent...

...One of PSOE's 1982 campaign posters, drawn by a famous Spanish artist, depicted Madrid's Retiro Park turned into what one supposed was a Spanish paradise—happy people enjoying a sunny day in a beautiful park...

...Leaders of the peace movements in northern Europe flocked in to endorse what they hoped would be a precedent...

...King Juan Carlos, the head of the military and a man the generals failed to consider, stood by the constitution...

...PSOE, under the twelve-year tenure of its young professionals, abandoned its traditional republicanism, wrote off Marx in 1978, and opted for the market economy of economic liberalism...

...Spain's intellectuals are accepted as leaders of policy debates...

...People believe that change will come and that it can be on democratic terms...

...If the thirty-seven years in which they suffered fascist rule left Spaniards a positive legacy, it is a communal interest in street-level politics, an appreciation of the importance of cultural freedom and integrity, and, with old Spain's passing, a feeling of national regeneration...

...market to Brazil...

...The anti-NATO campaign tried unsuccessfully to counter such rumors by saying American capital never let politics interfere with profit...

...Some critics say that la movida is connected with the nation's high unemployment...

...It is important as an example for other countries that Spain proves it is able to leave the blocs," said Petra Kelly, the Green party leader who came to Madrid with a letter supporting a "no" vote on NATO signed by 13 ex-generals of NATO countries...

...Arts policy debate centers on to what extent writers should be subsidized by the government and whether some of the money spent on the "ethereal arts"—street spectacles and neighborhood festivals—might be better used supporting the lasting works of material artists...

...That looked neither good nor democratic...

...Madriz Me Mata (Madrid [colloq.] Kills Me) is one of the la movida slogans of the capital...

...All this said, it would be wrong to paint Gonzalez as a mere opportunist and the PSOE as a circus of ideological chameleons...

...The Franco-educated middle class, "the stupid generation," stood an anxious watch...

...The new Spain enters its second decade as a country with economic maladies, political health, and a blooming cultural life...

...PSOE moved to woo the liberal center and in October 1982 it captured the Cortes (parliament) with 48 percent of the vote, up from 29 percent in 1977...

...Add two other blast-happy acronymic organizations and you begin to see why political violence follows unemployment as the Spaniards' main worry...

...They point to the government's pushing the la movida image with an international advertising campaign that toasts Madrid as the only city in the world where it is easy to order dinner at four in the morning...

...Three tendencies guided the party at that time: the older Stalinists satisfied with the Soviet example, the political strategists who saw the move to Eurocommunism as a feasible tactic, and the Eurocommunists who were anti-Stalinist and democratic...

...Bloodletting is left to the Basque separatists of ETA, who continue to kill with tacit support from 17 percent of the Basque population, which last June voted for Henri Batasuna, candidate of the one nationalist party that refuses to condemn the ETA...

...National television devotes five minutes of each half-hour newscast to museum exhibits, concerts, dance, theater, or street festivals...

...Carrillo and his followers, who set up the Table for Communist Unity (with Carrillo at the head seat...

...But Redondo, invoking the example of Sweden, says Spanish unions should be involved in the government's economic planning and not go into political opposition over issues of wages and labor law, the line taken by the more conservative construction sectors of UGT...

...This trade unionist is not to be taken lightly, for it was he who stage-managed the 1974 coup that put Felipe Gonzalez at the helm of PSOE...

...Polls showed however that the PSOE left-wing was not sufficiently riled to break ranks, and the elections were moved up to June...

...In the 1986 election the right saw its vote remain at its 1982 level of 26 percent...

...CoaliciOn Popular appears doomed to be the cranky voice of the propertied class...

...Like the Socialists, the Communists took pains to portray themselves as moderate and capable of governing...

...During the weeks leading up to the referendum all of Spain's well-known philosophers, historians, novelists and poets broadcast their views on the issue...

...THOUGH SPAIN'S FRAIL ECONOMY provided the Socialists with a strong argument during the NATO referendum, in the context of domestic politics the economic situation takes on another edge...

...PCE saw its share of the vote in 1982 fall to 4.13 percent from a high of 9 percent in 1977...

...After PSOE came to power in 1982 many center and a few Communist politicians experienced a socialist conversion that cynical Spain observed with delight...

...His gambit failed...

...In the autumn of that year fascist Spain quietly fell and political democracy emerged under the unforeseen tutelage of Franco's chosen heir, King Juan Carlos...

...Besides, there is a new spirit in Spain that dates from October 1982...

...These critics suspect that la movida was invented by aspiring artistic types whose only gift was a flair for publicity and whose main ability is to get money from PSOE bureaucrats who want to promote 166 Spain...

...THOUGH FAR FROM FREE OF INTERNAL DISSENT, PSOE does run Spain and from that position of power has been able to accommodate its own dissident wing, the Left Socialists (Izquierda Socialistas...

...Coaliciim Popular might have been able to maintain itself as a viable party had its Franquista leaders been parliamentary men...

...Metro graffiti in Salamanca, a barrio of wellheeled Madrilehos, read, "Under Franco we lived better," until a few strokes of the spray changed "we" to "some of us...

...The head of this coalition is a former Franco minister, the graceless Manuel Fraga...

...They were, however, inexperienced in the democratic process and it showed...

...On February 23, 1981, a Colonel Tejero and a band of soldiers stormed the Cortes with guns blasting as it was choosing Suarez's colorless successor, Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo...

...In the last couple of years Spain's seven largest banks have tallied record profits, unemployment has continued to climb, and President Gonzalez has begun to clash with Nicolas Redondo, secretary general of the socialist trade union, General Union of Workers (UGT...

...and PCE, which remained Eurocommunist but without a clear path...

...To move faster, these socialists argue, would throw both the economy and the body politic into turmoil, give the right a political opening, and threaten what progress has been made...

...What Spaniards lack in economic security is, to a certain extent, made up for by the richness of a public life that absorbs the pressures of the material world...

...As a result the relations between the intelligentsia and the working class are good...

...Nor is Madrid's Retiro unique...

...He thinks that support for Gonzalez's brand of socialism is eroding and that the party will begin a process of self-criticism at its next congress...

...On November 20, 1975, General Franco died...

...Many unemployed, this argument goes, live with their parents, spend what little money they have in the cafés where they stay all night, not having to worry about getting up for work...

...LA MOVIDA, HOWEVER, TAKES ON ITS FULLEST COLORS at night when cafes spill into such Madrid streets as Malasana, Huertas and Fernando Sexto...

...PCE was left with noisy internal arguments no one listened to...

...A neutral Spain outside NATO would, he said, suffer political isolation and economic hardship...

...He claims the Socialists are following neoliberal economic policies and, in the name of modernity, are willing to trade unemployment for a high-tech economy...

...This time around, the fear arose that Spain's vital shoe industry would lose its U.S...

...United Left received 4.6 percent of the vote, and seven deputies in the Cones...

...Conflict over NATO THEN CAME THE NATO REFERENDUM...

...The opponents of NATO countered by saying simply that neutrality is a fine thing in a nucleararmed, bilateral world...

...At that time PSOE will, Redondo hopes, be able to "free itself of some adventurers who have joined the Socialist family in recent years...

...Each has its own center-city reclamation projects...

...By this time many intellectuals, artists, and others had quit the party, disgusted by its purges and other sectarian symptoms...

...In response they boycotted PSOE's biennial congress in 1981, and Spain watched as one after another of Gonzalez's proposals went to the floor without debate and passed unanimously...

...Losing that share of NATO's industrial pie, the Gonzalez government successfully showed, would cost Spain heavily—something her 22 percent unemployed could not bear...

...In 1975, while official thought in the United States was successfully shucking the Vietnam experience, the opponents of Franco's dictatorship were rallying at the funerals of the fallen, sending vodka-injected oranges to friends in packed prisons, and going to bed—forbidden books hidden—in fear of latenight official knocks...

...The UCD lost out to the Socialists in October 1982 when it saw its share of the vote tumble to 7 percent from a 47 percent high in 1977...

...Nineteen-seventy-six began as a year of an untethered national police, bloody strikes, daily demonstrations, and great hope...

...It sometimes seems that every other young person you meet is willing to talk about their Sevillana (flamenco) lessons—these days a resurrected Spanish passion—and la movida, a loosely defined, post modernist cultural movement whose arena is the street...

...PSOE has taken that self-same path but managed to remain in power: a moderately socialist government with an absolute parliamentary majority...

...Deprived of their raison d'être, the Communists made it easy for many leftists to cast a "useful vote" for PSOE and against the right...

...Carrillo, now a Eurocommunist, put down the book of Gramsci, picked up 163 Lenin, and moved to consolidate his position in the party...

...In the June 1986 election the Communists had hoped to capitalize on the discontent generated by the Socialist turn to supporting Spain's membership in NATO...

...STILL OTHER CRITICS LAMENT the fact that la movida keeps people from reading as they once did...

...Today—fifty years after the start of the Spanish Civil War and ten years into democracy—Spain is governed by PSOE (Socialist Workers Party of Spain...

...PSOE itself was worried and had originally considered putting off the election until October...

...Each city and small town in Spain has its equivalent park...

...Felipe Gonzalez's apparent abandonment of what most Spanish leftists saw as a progressive foreign policy activated intra-party tensions...

...PCE broke with the Soviets in the mid-1950s...

...A similar united-front strategy had worked well enough in the earlier campaign against NATO...

...The young professionals were modern, 162 well-dressed, foreign-educated, and moderate...

...Most Spaniards' street life is an extension of their home life...

...Santiago Carrillo, chairman of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), who had originally nicknamed the king Juan Carlos the Brief, said after the coup that democracy could survive a thousand years with a monarchy like that...

...Even its slogans fail...

...After the NATO vote word came from Washington that the Avicor would again be purchased, though by another branch of the military...

...This staying power provides meager solace to those on the Spanish left who voted PSOE as a viable alternative in 1982 and then saw their socialist majority dole out piecemeal reform and lockstep with the U.S.-dominated NATO bloc...

...Suarez and his party got over 9 percent of the vote and 19 seats in the Cortes, making them the main beneficiaries of what little electoral discontent the four years of Socialist rule had fostered...

...Still, even these critics will admit there is no other country in Europe where they would consider living, and that, well, la movida's postmodern image makers have, whatever their motive, produced a revived cultural atmosphere...

...The leader of this centrist coalition, and the new Spain's first elected president, was Adolfo Suarez...

...He supports the Nicaraguan revolution and opposes U.S...

...Redondo, dissatisfied with PSOE's course, has moved to the left...