Europe's Pop Ideologist

...The extreme Right also campaigned against nato, and sought to destabilize the democratic regime by circulating rumors that King Juan Carlos had a terminal illness and Gonzalez was having an affair with a granddaughter of the late General Franco...

...This was a referendum many of them hadn't wanted and some of them would have liked to lose...

...This is important for Spain...

...Then he obtained a pro-nato vote from his party congress and fixed a date for the referendum...

...Monetarism is only a stopgap," a Madrid official said defensively last month, "for states whose economic model has broken down...

...Confident that the pro-nato motion would win, Gonzalez then voted against membership, presumably to please the Left and to avoid a split within his own party...

...Her government intervened in the affairs of the grounded Westland helicopter company to ensure that it was taken over by America's Sikorsky Aircraft, but failed to show the same enthusiasm when General Motors bid for Land Rover, although this was favored by the market...

...Informed Spaniards contrasted this attitude with the intimidation some Arab rulers deployed in their efforts to scare Spain when it was plucking up courage to establish diplomatic relations with Israel...

...France's economy perked up—not enough to save the Socialists from defeat in the parliamentary election, yet sufficiently to spare them the rout the majority of observers had expected...

...Inflation has subsided, and a "black" economy that hides from bureaucrats and ignores regulations has created some of the jobs officialdom failed to deliver...

...The Spanish government has just half-promised further steps it will take along the Reagan trail: fewer restrictions on business, a little less bureaucracy, more liberal labor regulations...

...Its leader, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, is so lacking in statesmanlike instincts that, although he says he supports nato, he urged the public to abstain from voting so as to embarrass Gonzalez...

...With inflation soaring and the franc plummeting, the French government soon went into reverse and applied remedies that were generally described—by rueful friends, angry Leftists and scornful Right-wingers—as Reaganite, though the grand old ideologue would have considered them half-hearted...

...Margaret's Limbo Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, was a charter subscriber to Reaganism...

...Washington pleased Spanish democrats by refraining from exerting the kind of pressure Left-wing propagandists had led many voters to expect, and Spain's European allies contented themselves with saying theyhopedit would remain in nato...

...An aristocratic authority on the Whitehall Circus made this comment: "Brittan was, of course, told by the Establishment that if he failed to assume responsibility, and did not refuse Mrs...

...He adds, however, that she could become a sacrificed pawn herself if the Conservative Party fails to improve its standing in the opinion polls, and if she fails to overcome the "dislike and disloyalty of her own Cabinet ministers, some of whom are becoming very nasty about her behind her back...

...After they won the 1982 election and public-opinion polls showed a majority hostile to nato, Left-wingers pressed Gonzalez, now Prime Minister, to honor his pledge...

...it is quite ruthless...

...Some of them have, for example, been whispering aggravating observations about her humble origins, which naturally leaked back to her...

...She has privatized more state-owned industries than any other European leader as much for financial as for ideological reasons...

...Felipe's Dalliance In mid-March, while the French Socialists were campaigning for re-election, the Spanish Socialists were caught in the turmoil of a referendum on continued membership in the Atlantic Alliance...

...While talking of market forces and the blessings of competition, she denationalized telecommunications yet left them in the hands of what is in effect a private monopoly...

...Following a cliff-hanging campaign, the referendum produced the answer Gonzalez wanted—"Yes" to continued membership in the Atlantic Alliance— and gave nato one of its greatest satisfactions of recent years...

...instead, it increased unemployment by 700,000...

...As a lower-middle class grocer's daughter, he concludes, "shehas no secure social base...

...Yet everyone over here knows, or thinks he knows, what Reaganomics is (the term is used in several languages...

...The Alianza Popular (Popular Alliance), the main party of the democratic Right, used the referendum campaign as a prologue to the next general election, due before October...

...The Communists, allied with pacifists and some disgruntled Socialists, waged a ferocious campaign to persuade the electorate to vote "No...

...Like Elizabeth I, Margaret I blamed a pawn for what she did, and sacrificed him—even though he was her Home Secretary, Leon Brittan...

...While we design a new one, the Reaganite variation on the monetarist theme seems to be working...

...Understandably, Socialists are embarrassed by the fact that Western Europe's two leading Left-wing governments had to scrap their own economic programs and borrow ideas from an American Administration presided over by a man they pretend to consider a Hol-lywoodcowboy...

...At length, he let it be known that "the realities of office" had convinced him of the Tightness of joining the Alliance...

...Socialist spokesmen reacted by recalling that' in 1966, when he was Franco's Propaganda Minister, Fraga supervised a referendum where only Francoists were allowed access to the media, and more votes were cast than there were registered voters...

...Even prime ministers who were not so educated are careful to employ Etonian advisers...

...Heath suffered because of that...

...in addition, he accused the government of planning to rig the vote...

...The man I am quoting admires Thatcher...

...But for North Sea oil," he says, "which her administration has strongly developed, the UK would now be bankrupt or a pensioner of charitable foreign countries...

...In Spain, Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez' team, elected in 1982, promised to create 800,000 jobs by Socialist magic...

...The Establishment will try to compensate him, if convenient and not too costly, but he should not count on it...

...so did Disraeli, but he had the adoration of the Queen...

...It occasioned an acrimonious national debate and threatened to devalue Parliament and discredit the leaders of the main democratic parties...

...Mention Marx to an average West-European today and he'll ask: "Which one...

...Spain was taken into nato by a Centrist (liberal-conservative) government in 1981...

...Both Left and Right berated him for his "inconsistency...

...The rumors became so widespread that both the King and the Prime Minister scoffed at them in public...

...In 1984 he approved an internal party document equating neutralism (which many Spanish Socialists favored) with "poverty, backwardness and Third-Worldism...

...As for Freud, he's the character in that end-of-the-world novel by Anthony Burgess...

...Reaganomics became, if not a lodestar, at least a beacon of sorts by which many officials, bankers and commentators took their bearings...

...Her relations with the Queen are cool, to say the least...

...Thatcher's handling of the Westland affair has been compared to the first Queen Elizabeth's execution of Mary Queen of Scots...

...Parliament approved membership but the Socialists, led by Felipe Gonzalez, voted against and promised a referendum on the subject, with the aim of overturning Parliament's decision when they came to power...

...Gonzalez stalled...

...but by the beginning of this year, GonzSlez had persuaded most party militants to join him in campaigning for the "Yes" option...

...A Conservative leader without a significant social base has to be very tough indeed...

...A reputable Center-party leader has informed me that, in October 1981, just before the crucial parliamentary debate on nato, Gonzalez told him: "You [Centrists] will all vote for nato, won't you...

...The Right-wing alliance of Jacques Chirac's neo-Gaullist Rally for the Republic and ex-President Valery Giscard d'Estaing's conservative Union for French Democracy won most of its votes by promising a change of atmosphere—not only less government intervention in the economy, but a clearer overall tilt toward Reaganism than the Socialists could steel themselves to offer...

...Thatcher certainly does not possess that asset...

...Members of the English Establishment are well practiced at this kind of thing, and those who were educated at Eton are the best...

...President Francois Mitterrand's Socialist government made frissons run down French backs in 1981-82 by its large-scale nationalizations and admirable, though expensive, social bonuses to a population that was already one of the most prosperous in Europe...

...Even among Reagan's supporters, few could then have guessed that within six years he would be considered an influential ideologist...

...The example of its French "coreligionists" (as the Spanish press calls them) served as a warning and restrained its zeal for compulsive change...

...Thatcher's pretended urgings that he not resign, he would never hold office again, he would have no hope of a peerage, he would not receive important briefs [he is a lawyer], and j udges would fro wn on him...

...Thefaith'spuristsnev-ertheless consider her something of a flibbertigibbet...

...He may, however, have been less inconsistent than was at first thought...

...His apparent about-face on the issue shocked many Spaniards, including some nato supporters...

...and the specter haunting the managers of more than one rickety European economy is not Communism, as Marx(theone with the fungus) proclaimed, but Reaganism...