SPAIN: The Stir of Discontent

In a Madrid hotel fortnight ago, 90 prominent Spaniards sat down to a dinner duly registered with the police as a monarchist lawyers’ meeting to discuss professional technicalities. In fact, many of the diners were not lawyers at all, and at least one was noted for republican sympathies. And when the speeches began, the technicalities of Spanish law were hardly mentioned. While police observers sat by, pencils racing, Joaquin de Satrústegúi, a wealthy Basque lawyer, launched into a go-minute attack on the government of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Franco, declared Lawyer Satrústegúi, had no legal mandate whatsoever to rule Spain in the first place. Worse yet. “years and years have passed, and he has never asked Spaniards their own opinion of what should be done for Spain, and there is a great disgust among the people.”

Last week, together with five of his colleagues. Monarchist Satrústegui was hauled off to Madrid’s Puerta del Sol police headquarters to explain himself. Released after two hours’ questioning, Satrústegui emerged exultant. “The government is now weak,” he said. “It cannot arrest me without doing great harm to itself.” Satrústegui’s remarks strongly suggested that the regime of Spain’s 66-year-old Caudillo (leader) was in trouble—more trouble than usual. To some degree, it was.

Reading the Signs. Despite the $1 billion which the U.S. has pumped into the Spanish economy since 1951, Spain, by a marvel of mismanagement, is in serious economic straits. In two years, the cost of living has jumped 40%, and prices are still rising. Spanish gold reserves are down to a skimpy $57 million; dollar reserves are virtually exhausted. And despite an official ban on the existence of any political party except Franco’s decrepit Falange, Spain abounds in opposition groups. Well known to Franco’s police, they range from a clutch of monarchist factions to syndicalists and anarchists, all the way to the Communists, who though few in number, are well financed and gaining sympathizers, thanks to the government’s endless plugging of the theme that the only choice open to Spain is “either Franco or Communism.”

Of all Franco’s opponents, only the Socialists command anything approaching mass support, and the Socialists are rent by a division between a new generation of Socialists and their leaders in Toulouse, who fought the Spanish Civil War, but are now out of touch. Except for the Communists, almost all opposition groups are willing to see Spain’s Bourbon monarchy restored, though only to reign, not to rule. Franco himself is committed to restoration of a king (probably 45-year-old Don Juan de Bourbon), though only after “the Caudillo is no longer with us because God wills it so.” Result is that Franco’s leniency toward Satrústegui was interpreted by many Spaniards not as a sign of weakness, but as the kind of leeway Franco allows, so long as no one goes too far, e.g., publicly tries to hold meetings as a declared political party.

A Crime a Day. One prominent Franco critic—Poet Dionisio Ridruejo, who used to be Falangist but is now a Social Democrat—believes that Franco might be provoked into repression violent enough to alienate the upper class. Last week even while a government prosecutor carefully stage-managed things to ensure that Poet Ridruejo was not sent to prison for a particularly violent anti-Franco article, Ridruejo was busily expounding his latest scheme to topple the Caudillo. Its essence: commission of one political “crime” a day by Spaniards so prominent that eventually Franco would be obliged to make mass arrests.

But Dictator Franco has survived for 20 years, partly by his own skill in manipulation, but largely because of the memory of the million dead in Spain’s 1936-39 civil war, an experiment that no one wants repeated.