the year before Franco’s death.
Nor could the Spanish authorities forgo the cooperation and skills of a growing urban work force. They were thus constrained to concede the
Labor protest in Spain, however, was kept firmly confined to bread and butter issues. By its last years, Franco’s regime—rather like that of Janos Kadar in Hungary—depended not on open and violent repression but rather upon a sort of enforced passive acceptance, a decades-long de-politicization of the culture. Student protesters, who since 1956 had been seeking greater campus autonomy and a relaxing of moral codes and other restrictions, were accorded a certain liberty to organize and protest within strictly circumscribed boundaries; they could even count upon some sympathy from the regime’s internal critics—reform-minded Catholics and disappointed ‘social-Falangists’ among others. But all active expressions of sympathy or collaboration across sectors—with striking miners, for example—were strictly off limits.[230] The same applied to the regime’s adult critics.
Indeed,
Spain’s traditional role as a bulwark of Christian civilization against materialism and atheism was a staple of the primary-school curriculum; but the Catholic hierarchy itself (unlike the modernizing ‘crypto monks’ of Opus Dei) was kept well away from the reins of power, in marked contrast to the neo-Crusading ‘National Catholicism’ spirit of the regime’s first decade.[231] In June 1968, bowing to modern reality, Franco conceded for the first time the principle of religious freedom, allowing Spaniards openly to worship at a church of their choosing. But by then religion itself was entering upon a long decline: in a country that could boast over 8,000 seminarists at the start of the Sixties, there were less than 2,000 twelve years later. Between 1966 and 1975 one third of all Spain’s Jesuits left the Order.
The military, too, was kept at a careful distance. Having himself come to power by a military coup, Franco understood very well the risks of alienating a military caste that had inherited an over-developed sense of its responsibility for the preservation of the Spanish state and its traditional values. Throughout the post-war years the Spanish Army was cosseted and flattered. Its victory in the Civil War was celebrated annually in the streets of major cities, its losses ostentatiously memorialized in the monumental Valley of The Fallen, completed in September 1959. Ranks and decorations multiplied: by the time the regime fell there were 300 generals, and the ratio of officers to other ranks was 1:11, the highest in Europe. In 1967, an Institutional Law of the State made the armed forces formally responsible for guaranteeing the nation’s unity and territorial integrity and defending ‘the institutional system’.
In practice, though, the armed forces had become superfluous. Franco had for decades preserved his military from any foreign or colonial wars. Unlike the French or Portuguese armies, they suffered no humiliating defeats or forced retreats. Spain faced no military threats, and its domestic security was handled by police, gendarmes and special units formed to fight terrorists—real and imaginary. The army, largely confined to a ceremonial role, had become risk averse; its traditional conservatism was expressed increasingly in enthusiasm for the return of the monarchy, an identification that was to prove ironically beneficial in the nation’s transition to democracy.
The affairs of the country were run by a restricted network of lawyers, Catholic professors and civil servants, many of them with active interests in the private companies favoured by their policies. But because formal political opposition was banned, it was from inside these same ruling circles—rather than amongst an intelligentsia whose leading lights remained in exile—that reforming ideas and pressure for change would come, prompted by frustration at local inefficiency, foreign criticism or the example of Vatican II.
Franco finally died on November 20th 1975, aged 82. Refusing to the end to consider any serious liberalizations or transfer of authority, he had already outlived his usefulness even to his own supporters, many of whom sympathized with demonstrators who earlier in the year had demanded a lifting of restrictions on the press and political associations. The transition to democracy was thus managed from within the ranks of Franco’s own ministers and appointees, which helps account for its speed and success. In the initial stages of Spain’s exit from Francoism the traditional forces of democratic change in Spain—liberals, Socialists, Communists, trade unions— played a subordinate role.
Two days after Franco died, Juan Carlos was crowned king. Initially he kept on Carlos Arias Navarro, Franco’s last Prime Minister, together with his cabinet colleagues, the better to reassure the army and others that there would be no sudden breach with the past. But in April 1976 Arias incurred royal disfavor when he clamped down on the newly-formed Democratic Coordination, a coalition of still-unauthorized parties of the Left, and arrested its leaders. Within two months the king had replaced Arias with one of his own ministers, Adolfo Suarez Gonzalez.
At forty four, Suarez was a typical late-Franco era technocrat; indeed, he had served for one year as the head of the Caudillo’s own Falangist National Movement. Suarez proved a remarkably astute choice. He formed a new political party, the Center Democratic Union (UCD) and set about persuading the sitting Francoist assembly to accept a national referendum on political reform—essentially, to approve the introduction of universal suffrage and a bi-cameral parliament. Wrong-footed by someone they had supposed to be one of their own, the Francoist old guard agreed—and the referendum passed, on December 15th 1976, with over 94 percent in favor.
In February 1977 Suarez authorized the return of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), the country’s oldest political organization, now led by the young Felipe Gonzalez Marquez from Seville, active in the clandestine movement since his early twenties. At the same time trade unions were legalized and accorded the right to strike. On April 1st Suarez banned and dismantled the National Movement he had once led; a week later he legalized the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), led by Santiago Carrillo and already committed (in striking contrast to its Portuguese comrades) to operating within the confines of a transition to parliamentary democracy.[232]
In June 1977 elections were held to form a Constituent Assembly with the task of writing a new Constitution. The election—the first in Spain since 1936—produced a plurality for Suarez’s UCD, which won 165 seats in the Cortes; the second-placed party, Gonzalez’s Socialists, managed just 121, all the other contenders between them taking just 67.[233] In many ways this was the best possible outcome: Suarez’s victory reassured conservatives (most of whom had voted for him) that there would be no sharp lurch to the Left, while the absence of a clear majority obliged him to work with Left-wing deputies who thus shared responsibility for the new Constitution that the new Assembly was to draft.
This Constitution (duly confirmed in a second referendum in December 1978) was in most respects quite conventional. Spain was to be a parliamentary monarchy; there was to be no official religion (though in a calculated concession to the Church, Catholicism was recognized as a ‘social fact’); the voting age was reduced to eighteen; and the death penalty was abolished. But in a major break with the recent past, the Assembly wrote into Spain’s new laws a right of autonomy for the country’s historic regions, notably Catalonia and the Basque country.
Article Two of the Constitution affirmed ‘the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation, common and indivisible
