Andalusians, Canaries, Valencians, Navarrese and many others were to be recognized as distinct and separate.[234]
Under the new constitution, however, Madrid retained responsibility for defense, justice and foreign affairs, an unacceptable compromise for Basque nationalists especially. As we have seen, ETA had deliberately stepped up its campaign of violence and assassinations in the months when the new constitution was under discussion, targeting policemen and soldiers in the hope of provoking a backlash and bringing down a democratic process that seemed increasingly likely to weaken the extremists’ case.
In 1981 they might have succeeded. On January 29th, with economic discontent at its peak (see below) and Catalonia, the Basque region, Galicia and Andalucia all embarking upon separatist experiments in home rule, Suarez was forced to resign by his own party—resentful not at his failures (the 1979 general elections under the new constitution had produced another victory for the UCD) but at his achievements—and his autocratic management style. Before another UCD politician, Calvo Sotelo, could succeed him in office, a general strike broke out in the Basque Provinces. To its critics on the Right, democratic Spain appeared leaderless and on the verge of breaking up.
On February 23rd Lt. Colonel Antonio Tejero Molin Molina of the Civil Guard seized the Cortes at gunpoint. In a coordinated move, General Jaime Milans del Bosch, commander of the Valencia military region, declared a state of emergency and called upon the King to dissolve the Cortes and install a military government. Though in retrospect their actions appear theatrical and bumbling, Tejero and Milans del Bosch surely had tradition and precedent on their side. Moreover there was little the Cortes itself, or the various political parties and their supporters, could have done to block a military coup d’etat, and the sympathies of the army itself were far from certain.[235]
What determined the outcome, and the shape of subsequent Spanish history, were King Juan Carlos I’s outright rejection of the conspirators’ demands and his televised speech uncompromisingly defending the Constitution and unambiguously identifying himself and the monarchy with the country’s emerging democratic majority. Both sides were probably equally surprised by the courage of a young king who until then had lived in the shadow of his own appointment by the late dictator; but now his fate was irrevocably linked with parliamentary rule. Lacking an institution or a symbol around which to rally their forces, most of those policemen, soldiers and others nostalgic for the old regime turned away from dreams of revolt or restitution and confined themselves instead to supporting Manuel Fraga’s Popular Alliance, a newly-formed party committed to fighting ‘the most dangerous enemies of Spain: Communism and separatism’, but within the law.
The discredit that Tejero had brought on his ‘cause’ initially afforded an opportunity for the Cortes to cut the military budget and pass a long-overdue bill legalizing divorce. But the UDC majority was increasingly caught between a clericalist and nationalist Right that was unhappy at the speed of change, disturbed by regional autonomy and offended by the relaxed public morals of the new Spain, and a newly assertive Socialist Left, open to compromise on constitutional affairs but presenting a radical face to the country’s fractious labor movement and the growing number of unemployed.
As in Portugal, the political transition had come at a difficult economic moment. In large measure this was the responsibility of the last governments of the Franco era, who between 1970 and 1976 had sought to buy popularity by increasing public spending and public sector employment, subsidizing energy costs, holding back prices while letting wages rise, and paying little attention to the long term. By 1977 the consequences of this insouciance were beginning to be felt: in June of that year, at the time of the general election, inflation was running at 26 percent per annum, the state coffers (long starved by Franco’s regressive tax regime) were drying up and unemployment was entering a long upward curve. Between 1973 and 1982 the country lost an estimated 1.8 million jobs.[236]
As in the short-lived Republic of the 1930s, Spain was building a democracy in the teeth of an economic recession, and there was much talk of the country going the way of Argentina, with indexed wages and government-subsidized prices degenerating into hyper-inflation. If this was averted, much of the credit must go to the signatories of the so-called Moncloa Pacts of October 1977, the first in a series of negotiated settlements in which politicians, labour leaders and employers agreed to embark upon a broad range of reforms: devaluation of the currency, an incomes policy, controls on government expenditure and structural reforms of the country’s huge and wasteful public sector.
The Moncloa Pacts and their successors (the last accord was signed in 1984) worked no miracles. Thanks in part to the second oil shock, the country’s balance of payments crisis steadily worsened; many smaller firms folded, and unemployment and inflation rose in tandem, provoking a wave of strikes as well as bitter schisms within the left-wing unions and the Communist Party, reluctant to continue sharing responsibility for the social costs of democratic transition. But without the Pacts these divisions, and their social consequences, would almost certainly have been more severe still.
In the elections of October 1982, at the height of the economic difficulties, the Socialist Party won an absolute majority in the parliament and Felipe Gonzalez took over as Prime Minister, a post he would hold for the next fourteen years. Suarez’s Center Democrats—who had led the transition out of Francoism—were all but eliminated from parliament, winning just two seats. The Communist Party won four, a humiliating defeat that provoked the resignation of Santiago Carrillo. Henceforth Spanish politics were to follow the pattern of the rest of western Europe, regrouping around a center-Left and a center-Right, in this case Fraga’s PopularAlliance (renamed the People’s Party in 1989) which won a surprising 26.5 percent of the vote.
The Socialist Party had campaigned on a populist and anti-capitalist program, promising among other things to preserve workers’ jobs and spending power and get Spain out of NATO. Once in power, however, Gonzalez maintained policies of economic austerity, began the modernization (and later the progressive privatization) of Spanish industry and services, and in 1986 defeated many of his own supporters in a referendum on the question of NATO membership, which he now favored.[237]
These reversals of direction did not endear Gonzalez to old-line Socialists, whose Party he was now leading away from its longstanding Marxist commitment.[238] But for a politician whose core support came increasingly from men and women too young to remember the Civil War, and whose openly-avowed goal was to overcome Spain’s backwardness—the much-debated
The democratic transition of Mediterranean Europe was quite the most remarkable and unexpected development of the age. By the early eighties, Spain, Portugal and Greece had not merely undergone peaceful conversion to parliamentary democracy: in all three countries the local Socialist Party—clandestine and ostentatiously anti-capitalist just a few years earlier—was now the dominant political force, governing in effect from the center. The regimes of Salazar and Franco disappeared not just from office but from memory, as a new generation of politicians competed for the allegiance of a youthful, ‘modern’ electorate.
There were several reasons for this. One, already noted, was that in Spain in particular it was the political state, not society at large, which had fallen so very far behind. The economic development of Franco’s last decade, and the large-scale social and geographical mobility that it brought about, meant that daily life and expectations in Spain had changed far more than outside observers supposed, who still looked at the country through the prism of the years 1936-56. Young people in Mediterranean Europe did not find it difficult to adapt to social routines long familiar further north; indeed, they were already doing so before the political revolutions. Impatient to be released from the constrictions of another age, they were distinctly skeptical of the political rhetoric of Right or Left and unmoved by old loyalties. Visitors to Lisbon or Madrid in the post-transition years were consistently taken aback at the absence of any reference to the recent past, whether in politics or culture. [239]
The coming irrelevance of the 1930s was presciently captured in
