Time for a Change

Spain took another giant step out from the shadow of Francisco Franco last week--and right into the first political crisis of King Juan Carlos' reign. In a move that surprised even his closest aides, Premier Carlos Arias Navarro, 67, went to Madrid's Royal Palace and submitted his resignation to the King. Juan Carlos, according to the constitution, had ten days to choose a new Premier. Last Saturday, he named Adolfo Suarez Gonzalez, the secretary general of Spain's only legal party, the National Movement. A close friend of the King, Suarez, 43, has been a leading advocate of the government's reform program.

Sources close to Arias insisted that he had stepped down because he felt Spain's transition to democracy was complete and that it was therefore time for a change. Most observers, though, believed that he had been forced out of office by Juan Carlos, who did not want him as Premier in the first place and who considers him too stiff and cautious. Relations between the two men have steadily deteriorated, and it seemed the King wanted a man less beholden to the archconservative Franquistas (known collectively as "the Bunker") as his chief of government.

A mournful-looking man with an unctuous public style, Arias himself has had a sometimes troubled relationship with the Bunker. As Franco's last Premier, Arias launched a policy of apertura (opening) that infuriated rightists, even though it involved such modest gestures as allowing free elections in some municipalities and the formation of certain limited political "associations." Nonetheless, he was imposed on the King by the rightists after Franco's death as the only possible compromise choice for Premier.

Under the elaborate rules bequeathed to Spain by Franco, the King had to select his new Premier from a list of three names submitted by the Council of the Realm, an advisory body with a strong rightist outlook. Juan Carlos, however, seems to have had enough prestige and control over the council to get from it the kind of moderately reform-minded Premier he wanted. In addition to Suarez, the council suggested Gregorio Lopez Bravo, conservative former Foreign Minister under Franco, and Federico Silva Munoz, a former Public Works Minister under Franco and reputedly the most liberal of the three candidates.

Although considered somewhat conservative in the past, Suarez fully supported the modest steps toward democracy that Spain has taken in the past six months. In recent weeks, for example, he was the leading government spokesman in the Cortes for the Cabinet-drafted laws legalizing non-Communist political parties, guaranteeing the rights of assembly and public demonstrations and reforming labor relations. Hardline Franquistas charged that Suarez had helped destroy the National Movement he headed by supporting the reforms, but the measures did not go far enough to please either opposition leaders or Juan Carlos, who felt a faster pace was necessary.

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