For the people of a country that had not gone to the polls to elect its leaders for 41 years, last week's Spanish elections were a celebration -- an affirmation that the long night of Franco's tyranny was indeed over. With joy and assurance they voted in Premier Adolfo Suarez, rejecting the extremes of both right and left. In our cover story this week, we examine the nation's emotional yet orderly transition from dictatorship to democracy. Madrid Correspondent Karsten Prager was struck by Spain's ability to emerge so smoothly from a political vacuum. "There are not many parallels," says Prager, "even though the political changes of the past 18 months might have gone deeper, and even though reform was not so much negotiated as conceded."

After four decades of what one Basque described as the "boca cerrada " (closed mouth). Prager did find that many citizens were reluctant to speak with reporters. Suarez too has avoided the press, although he granted Prager an off-the-record interview at Moncloa Palace a few days before the election. Sums up Prager: "Suarez has kept his counsel and his cool. He is plainly aware that Spain has changed and continues to change, that the new look in the society is more than cosmetic, and that the new look in politics will have to follow suit."

In our Energy section we describe the planned journey south of the first oil to flow through the Alaskan pipeline, which will go into service this week after the spending of $9 billion and more than three years of construction. The story was written by John S. DeMott, with the help of Reporter-Researcher Gail Perlick. No one knows exactly when the pioneer ribbon of oil will reach the end of its nearly 800-mile trip or, strangely enough, where all of it will go after it gets there. The economic and political implications of the various plans being made to refine the oil, some of which cannot be handled by existing West Coast facilities, were reported by Washington Correspondent Don Sider. The description of the pipeline itself, with its adjoining highway for trucks and its walkways for caribou, came from our Alaska stringer, Jeanne Abbott, who has traveled its entire length. She says the pipeline has transformed her state, making "the old casual frontier style a quaint backdrop to a fast-paced urban way of life."

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