The Unsolved Problems of Succession

HIS flesh hangs on an aged frame. His mouth sags. His palsied right hand sometimes shakes so badly that he must grip it in his left. His voice, always shrill, is strained and thin. Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teodulo Franco y Bahamonde--known more familiarly as Francisco Franco and el Caudillo (the Leader)--turns 80 this week, a pinnacle granted few world leaders. The man who has ruled Spain since 1939 planned to celebrate quietly in Madrid's elegant Pardo Palace, where he lives with his wife Carmen Polo de Franco, 72, amid Goya tapestries, Velasquez paintings and liveried servants.

Age for Franco has become a standing enemy. "I will continue as long as God grants me life and health," he has promised. When the newspaper Madrid last year suggested that he emulate France's Charles de Gaulle and retire, its presses were silenced by government decree for six months and the paper eventually went out of business. Nonetheless Franco has already prepared for his eventual death, and reserved a tomb in the "Valley of the Fallen," the grandiose memorial mausoleum carved by Republican prisoners of war in and around a granite mountain 30 miles from Madrid to hold Civil War dead.

Anchor. Franco has notably failed to prepare his countrymen for the upheaval that could follow more than three decades of one-man rule. Six years ago, to be sure, he did draw up a "law of succession." Under that law and codicils added to it last July, el Caudillo will be succeeded by two men. Prince Juan Carlos de Borbon y Borbon, 34, grandson of Alfonso XIII, the last Spanish monarch, will be crowned King and chief of state. The head of government will be Vice Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, 69, a Franco crony.

The choices have an air of impermanence about them. Juan Carlos was tapped by Franco mainly because he will be a more docile King than his father, Don Juan, 59, would be. Even so, the heir apparent is liberal enough so that some conservatives within Franco's National Movement, or ruling party, are already considering an alternative. He is Don Alfonso de Borbon y Dampierre, 36, who has the additional advantage of being Franco's grandson by marriage and the father of the Leader's only great-grandchild. Two weeks ago to mark the christening in the Pardo Palace chapel of infant Francisco Borbon Martinez-Bordiu, Alfonso and his wife Carmencita were designated Duke and Duchess of Cadiz. Franco's reasoning in restoring the monarchy was to provide Spaniards with a familiar anchor after he is gone. Cynics refer to the King-designate as "Juan Carlos the Brief." "Everywhere else," a Madrid university student complained, echoing an attitude common among young Spaniards, "they are shooting at kings or at least asking serious questions about what they do. Here we plan to restore one; it doesn't make sense."

As for Carrero Blanco, he is antiCommunist, antiMason, somewhat anti-American and rigidly nationalistic. He rarely smiles and is disliked within the military because he skipped the sea duty required for promotion to admiral. He also lacks Franco's deftness in playing factions against each other.

If the dual succession does not survive, the army could be the key to whatever follows. Franco has emasculated ambitious contenders for power to the point that anything could happen once he is gone. A strong possibility in such an event is an arrangement between the army and the extreme right. A new dictator could emerge, but he would likely have only enough power to maintain the internal status quo and not the absolute power that Franco wields.

A second possibility is a coalition between the army and Opus Dei. Sometimes called "God's Octopus," Opus Dei is a mystical network of Catholic laymen and clerics whose members combine spiritual discipline with temporal progress. They have had great influence on Spain. Many of the government's technocrats and statesmen belong, including Foreign Minister Gregorio Lopez Bravo and Development Planning Minister Laureano Lopez Rodo. If that group came to power, it would likely protect traditional values and at the same time press for moderate reform. Its members are best qualified to position Spain in modern Europe.

The army's third alternative is to group with the Falange, the once fascist-oriented political organization developed behind Franco during the Civil War but downplayed ever since. The blue-shirted Falange is fading; its membership is down to 300,000, most of them aging. To secure power, it would need much more popular support than it has now. What some educated Spaniards would like, but few think is feasible, is the establishment of true political parties, one of which would share the philosophy of West Germany's moderate middle-class Christian Democrats. "We had no middle class in Spain before the war," says Barcelona Banker Ramon Trias Fargas. "But we have one now, and these people have no voice in politics--yet." Franco adamantly refuses to give them one. Only two months ago he rejected a proposal by moderate advisers that he allow a variety of nonradical political parties under the sheltering umbrella of the National Movement to provide a broader sense of participatory government.

The law of succession is plainly and sadly inadequate to cope with the stresses of future shock, political, social and economic (see box). In many ways, Spain is belatedly catching up with its neighbors. Only a generation ago, Spanish girls were not allowed out without duennas; today they roam alone in miniskirts on the street and bikinis on the beach. Some working-class families, for the first time have telephones, refrigerators and TVs, and every sizable city has a traffic jam. Spaniards, in short, are changing far more quickly and easily than their institutions, which are showing increasing strains. Items:

>A serious split has developed between the state and Spain's second most powerful entity, the Roman Catholic Church. Increasingly, liberal priests and bishops, spurred by Vatican II, want to separate church and state into what Madrid's Vicente Cardinal Enrique y Tarancon last week described as a condition of "independence and cordiality."

>Education is inadequate. University curriculums are too old-fashioned in a world of modern technology, and at lower levels, schools do not have enough places. As a Spanish coed recently put it: "Franco may have been good for our parents, but he's not good for us." Along with their disgust at educational shortcomings, students are also restless for political freedom.

>Spanish justice is still harsh. Death penalties are imposed not by courts but by the army, although Franco has the last word (after a singular outburst of worldwide protest two years ago against Spanish severity, he moved quickly to commute death sentences passed on six Basque separatists). Conscientious objectors, most of them Jehovah's Witnesses, have been in prison for more than ten years at hard labor for refusing on religious grounds to serve in the army.

The institutions, in short, are more suited to the world of 1892, the year Franco was born in the Galician seaport of El Ferrol (now El Ferrol del Caudillo), the son of a navy paymaster. Francisco hoped to become a naval officer but he could not; one version is that he was too short (5 ft. 3 in.), another is that when he came of age the Navy was too poor and too battered by the '98 war with the U.S. to accept new officer-candidates. Franco, in any case, entered the army instead. He forsook wine, women, friendships and even religion to concentrate on soldiering. There was ample opportunity for that in Morocco where both the French and the Spanish struggled to subdue rebellious Berber tribesmen. Franco fought in scores of battles, was wounded and advanced rapidly. He became Spain's youngest general at 34.

After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, he flew home to join the rebel side at the head of an airborne invasion of Spanish Foreign Legionnaires. Early in the war, two generals senior to Franco were killed, and he emerged as the insurgent commander. Three months after the fighting started, he was formally acknowledged in the city of Burgos as leader of what would become the victorious side.

The war that followed for three bloody years became an epic of its time, with all the emotive horror that Viet Nam has spawned today. Nazi Germany sided with Franco; the war was an apt testing ground for new weapons like the Stuka dive bomber. The Soviet Union backed the Spanish Republic and its Popular Front Government; so did Communists everywhere. Volunteers poured in from around the world, among them a brigade of intellectuals, including Ernest Hemingway, Andre Malraux, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell. The war was to shape their words forevermore. They carried the memory of it within their hearts, Albert Camus observed afterward, "like an evil wound." Camus explained why: "It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many men, the world over, regard the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy."

The Pariah. Spain's brutal war had scarcely subsided in 1939 before Europe's war began. Despite his debts to Germany and Italy for their help in his victory, Franco avoided the bigger battle, and even turned aside a German request for permission to attack Gibraltar through Spain. Franco and Hitler met for nine hours one day in 1940 to discuss the question. By the end of their conversation, Hitler was unnerved by Franco's high-pitched monotone. "The man is not cut out to be a politician," the Fuehrer complained later. "I would rather have three or four teeth pulled out than go through that again."

Nevertheless, Franco's sympathies were so obvious that at war's end he was considered a pariah by the victorious allies. Spain was refused membership in the new United Nations organization, France for a time closed its borders and halted commerce, and active plans were made to overthrow Franco. Economic crisis and occasionally actual hunger plagued Spaniards. They warmed to Franco for the first time when he told them defiantly: "If the world chooses to turn its back on us, we will go it alone."

Franco's isolation ended after the Berlin blockade persuaded the U.S. that Spain was essential for the defense of Western Europe. In 1953 John Foster Dulles drew up a pact providing $85 million in economic aid and $141 million in military aid in exchange for U.S. air and naval bases in Spain. It was the high point of Franco's long career. "The West needs us in the fight against Communism," he boasted to a Falange meeting in Madrid.

At a time when European security is being negotiated with the Russians, the boast is no longer true. The question now is whether Spain can afford to do without Europe. The nation that up to now has contributed mainly maids and labor and a place in the sun to the rest of the Continent desperately needs "the political education or background to know how to get what we want," as University of Barcelona Student Victoria Gaya puts it.

"The real battleground," says Economist Fabian Estape, "is Spain's place in the world. Those now in positions of power and those seeking power are sharply divided on the issue. One of the greatest ways to embarrass this government would be to issue it an invitation to join the European Economic Community." That is not likely to happen, although the EEC is about to allow Spain generous tariff reductions on industrial goods and most agricultural products.

The rest of Europe insists on remembering all too clearly who it was that cheered for Hitler in World War II. The Benelux countries in particular are vehemently opposed to letting Spain into the Common Market club, so long as it is ruled by Franco or anyone like him. On the other hand, Western Europe hopes to influence the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the direction of liberalism, with a policy of "Wandel dutch annaeherung," or "change through drawing nearer," as West German Chancellor Willy Brandt puts it. That same policy might equally and more profitably be applied to Spain.

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