STIRRINGS IN SPAIN

...While the making of economic demands is the chief immediate function of the commissions, their long-run objective is the end of the regime-controlled labor movement and the establishment of a free union system...

...standards, the Spanish are better clothed and fed and housed than at any time in their history...

...The chief elements in this fluidity are the lifespan and health of the aging Generalissimo, the superbly vague and controversial Organic Law of the State (the new constitution) approved late last year, and the generalized restlessness in every segment of society, ranging from the labor unions to the Roman Catholic Church...

...Significantly, links between the liberal church and the labor rebels are being forged...

...It may even be permissible to argue that General Franco set in motion the process of self-liquidation of his dictatorship, a feat unique in modern history, when he penned his signature to the press law...

...What Spain faces, then, in 1967 is a fluid, flexible, and confused situation in which the imponderables are vastly more numerous than the constants...

...The Spanish future, therefore, lies in the attitudes and the behavior of the new Spanish society and not in the wishes or desires of the seventyfour-year-old Generalissimo's regime and its fast crumbling pillars...

...The division is not only between the "old guard" and the "modernists," or "Europeans," in the cabinet, but between the differing power elements that General Franco had so long kept together in the uneasy alliance that has assured his brand of stability...

...But, again, the scales may well be tipped by the realities of the surging new society, which include the political ambitions for tomorrow on the part of the increasingly important younger figures in the Franco regime...

...Since the new constitution does not apply to him, General Franco is free to waive the post of Chief of Governr ment and name a Prime Minister—or not...

...There are Falangists who hope for the survival of the present semi-Fascist system and to whom monarchy is anathema...

...Spain has completed a decade of unprecedented economic growth, initially helped along by U.S...

...In broad terms, it is a classical Franco compromise which, in effect, short-changes everybody in Spain, from the pathetic Falangists to the hopeful democrats...

...So long as General Franco is alive and functioning, every government here will be a Franco government...

...This is not to suggest, however, that Franco has suddenly acquired a taste for democracy...

...The ferment also exists, increasingly, in the universities and in the Roman Catholic Church...

...In the course of this year, the regime has to draft a number of new basic laws designed to implement the constitution, and their nature will be inevitably influenced by the personalities in a new team to be formed by the Prime Minister...

...Wooden shoes and hemp sandals are disappearing, and illiteracy is declining...

...Everything will depend on how the current process—including the ferment in labor and the Church and the turn the economic situation may take this year—works out...

...An important counterpoint is the press law, promulgated last spring, which did more than any other single event to launch the political gamesmanship in Spain...

...Simply because of attrition, age, ferment—and of growing official impotence—is among the long-captive labor unions...

...In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine who and what constitute the regime...

...Nor was the total vote diminished by the fact that the lack of a voting receipt could result in the loss of a worker's wages...

...While Spaniards submit to the Franco regime because they know it must go away sooner rather than later, they seem unprepared to move into a new dictatorship, even if a more streamlined one...

...This economic and industrial revolution is paralleled by the challenge of the rising generations to their outmoded and repressive social and political institutions...

...Almost incredibly—if one remembers the history of the Spanish church—a group of liberal bishops has emerged to challenge the sway of the conservatives in the hierarchy...

...It would be foolish to prophesy a monarchy or a regency or a Franco-type presidentialism, or to guess which, if any, of the royal candidates may succeed General Franco to the post of Chief of State...

...Nothing like this has been seen in Spain since before the Civil War...

...The emergence last year of "Workers' Commissions"—illegal but effective leadership groups—within the regime-controlled labor movement has coincided with the first signs of an industrial recession to turn the union situation into an extremely grave challenge to the government's exercise of power...

...When six of their leaders were detained, 13,000 workers in the electronics plants staged a sit-down strike until the government released the men...

...He is the author of several books, including "The Winds of Revolution" and "The Twilight of the Tyrants...

...Another weakness, or virtue, of the Franco constitution is that it is sufficiently vague to offer room for a variety of interpretations—and some of them may actually turn out to be quite positive...

...Production is double that of the mid-Fifties...

...one may mean the collapse of the other with unforeseeable consequences for this often bloodied nation...

...Using the Vatican Ecumenical Council as their banner, the liberals in the church and lay organizations such as Spanish Catholic Action are openly agitating for the end of the alliance between the Franco regime and the hierarchy, and for political freedoms and social justice...

...The Church is split down the middle between the liberals and the conservatives...

...Put another way, the contest is no longer between those who wish to retain an uncompromising dictatorship and those who believe in democracy...

...Against this background of the deepening ferment throughout the new Spanish society is the crucial fact that the Franco establishment itself is divided...

...These two concepts—democratization and succession—are intimately linked in Spain's immediate future, and the failure of TAD SZULC is Madrid correspondent for The New York Times...

...In short, it is a delightfully maddening scenario for a shadow play, and it is an intriguing thought that Franco may have just enough of a secret sense of humor to want to see Spanish politicians try to act it out...

...and for the first time since 1938 criticism of the regime and proposals for reforms began to appear in print...

...In another dimension, there are the members of Opus Dei, the still mysterious Catholic lay order, who seem to agree on a relatively modern "European" political system with the maintenance of their economic interests...

...Stirrings in Spain by TAD SZULC Madrid FTVHIS may be the Year of the Great ••&bull...

...The vital fact about Spain today is the momentum of its society—a generation that no longer really cares about who was right in the Civil War three decades ago—and not General Franco and his past or present allies and associates...

...Exercising their new power, the commissions have already pushed towards situations of "labor conflict" in the national railroad system and in a group of electronics plants in the Madrid area...

...In the shop-stewards' elections last September, the "commissions"—made up of progressive Catholics, Socialists, and Communists—won sixty per cent of the posts throughout Spain...

...Spaniards—and, presumably, Gen eral Franco—realize that a new chief of state saddled with an unpopular system would be facing unrest threatening to undo whatever the Franco "Years of Peace" have achieved in the positive realm...

...In examining the Spanish problem as it stands at this juncture of events, it is necessary to do away with the comfortable cliches about dictatorships and democracies, and the usual strictures about Franco, the Falange, the Church, and the rest of it...

...Although, in a real sense, the division of executive power is really designed for the post-Franco period, the emergence of a Prime Minister at this time would loom as the start of the transition and the accentuation of the essentially lame-duck character of the Spanish Establishment in its present form...

...The real struggle is between the Spaniards in positions of power who hope to slow down the process (and thereby preserve their influence and privileges a bit longer) and the Spaniards—some of them, too, in power positions—who favor rapid evolution...

...There are shades within shades, temporary and permanent alliances and, above all, a pattern of jockeying for power that has not been seen here in three decades...

...In the universities, the government last year lost the battle to maintain its official student organization, which is the campus equivalent of the regime's labor movement...

...There are, to be sure, different modalities of dignity as well as of pride and prestige...

...In the meantime, the existence and the power of the Workers' Commissions looms as a major political fact in the Spanish transition...

...There are powerful men who are both anti-monarchist and anti-Falangist and who opt for a disguised presidential system with vast power in the hands of the Prime Minister...

...In conclusion, what the 1966 press law and, subsequently, the new constitution, have accomplished has been to set in motion a political process that is reaching into every corner of the Spanish society...

...In some Madrid and Barcelona industries, the commissions scored between ninety and one hundred per cent, doing away with the pro-regime leadership and assuming the real control of these unions...

...It is possible, however, to venture the opinion that a solution completely imposed from the top would not be attempted out of concern that the whole painstakinglybuilt succession machine would collapse...

...The Great Experiment will test whether a traditional dictatorship, such as Generalissimo Francisco Franco's twenty-eightyear-old institution, can be phased out into something reasonably approaching democracy and whether his painstakingly constructed mechanism of succession is, indeed, workable...

...aid, and is now seeking to enter the modern European industrial world she so long resisted...

...It is probably more accurate to say that he has the instinct for bending with the winds of history and an impressive sense of timing that allows him to roll with the punch while retaining his dignity...

...Direct censorship of the press was abolished—although the government retains the right to seize objectionable material by court order&mdash...

...In last year's battle over the constitution, the three Opus Dei cabinet ministers played a rather liberal role against the Falangists and, more subtly, against some of the "old guard" types...

...Finally, there are the immense •economic interests created in the shadow of the regime whose political tastes range from the maintenance of a tough dictatorship to a liberal monarchy...

...But chances are that he will do so, sometime in 1967, even though the Prime Minister is certain to be a man totally dedicated to him and deprived of any real power...

...But in the peculiar Spanish dimension of politics, it gives something to everybody by dint of shortchanging the other fellow...

...A rising steel industry, large-scale hydroelectric power development, a rapidly growing automobile industry, new roads, airports, and seventeen million tourists in 1966—all these mark a new era for a long-slumbering, backward-looking nation that was once a great European and world power...

...To win, as he did, a monumental 95.9 per cent of the ballots in an election in which a claimed 88.8 per cent of the electorate voted, Franco allowed the referendum to be turned into a personal popularity contest in which the steamroller of official propaganda effectively silenced all dissent and in which some ballot-box legerdemain was apparently permitted to operate...

...The major political step under the new constitution is the separation of the powers of Chief of State and Chief of Government...

...The French parallel of de Gaulle and Debre or Pompidou applies here, and it might be added that the difference in political thought between de Gaulle and Franco is not all that great...

...But what is this new constitution and what sort of framework does it provide for the conduct of the Great Experiment...

...But this is where the similarity with the past and current Franco regimes may end...

...While far from prosperous by U.S...

...There are those who wish to maintain the legal fiction, reaffirmed in the new constitution, that Spain is a kingdom, but who prefer a Francotype regent to a king...

...There are the monarchists, each supporting one of the four candidates in the field for succession to General Franco...

...For Franco, the old warrior and the personification of the grave Castilian pride (though he is a son of sentimental Galicia), this measure of dignity was the need to obtain a shattering majority of "yes" votes in the December 14 referendum on his new constitution...

...General Franco has exercised both since 1936, and the Succession Law of 1947 has confirmed him in these twin posts for his lifetime...

...The situation is now in something of a no-man's land, as neither the regime nor the rebel force of students has been able to establish full control, except in Barcelona where the "democrats"—the rebels—are in effective power...

...so is per capita income...

...It was a shame that this display of Establishment zeal on behalf of the General's pride did so much to detract from what, in the relative terms of changing Spain, was the positive step of the new constitution...

...What the outcome of this process may be is beyond intelligent prediction at this point...