SPAIN: Communist Chief Invokes The Ghost Of The Republic

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Sep 17 1996 (IPS) - The ghost of the Spanish republic, supposedly laid to rest by unanimous support for King Juan Carlos, has been reinvoked by Communist (PCE) leader Julio Anguita’s call to scrap the monarchy and recreate a Spanish republican state.

Anguita told a party meeting at the weekend that the PCE should not feel obliged to honour a cross-party agreement to defend Spain’s post-dictatorship constitution if the other parties were, as he put it, undermining its standards.

The PCE chief, leader of the opposition United Left coalition (IU), received a flood of criticism for his challenge to one of the most fundamental principles of post-Franco Spanish politics — that of the role of the King in bulwarking Spanish consensus.

Angel Acebes of the ruling Popular Party (PP) described Anguita’s proposals as a “calculated strategy, and a serious error”. It raised, he said, “a debate which does not exist in Spanish society, any more than it does in the left, and which is a long way from the feeling of the majority.”

The Socialist (PSOE) opposition warned of the dangers of violence inherent in reopening “a closed debate”. PSOE spokesman Jesus Caldera dismissed the matter as a “blatant communist-style discourse without a future and of a type hardly heard since the fall of the Berlin Wall”.

The Communist leader maintains that his comments were not an attack on the monarchy. He says the country’s democratic standards are ‘in regression”.

He said the PCE originally accepted the parliamentary monarchy because the Constitution was built on principles which the Party supports: the right to work and full employment, public health, decent pensions, solidarity and justice.

But there were “economic powers, political forces, social groups and collectives with anti-constitutional practices sealed up in the State apparatus,” he said, that aimed at creating “a submissive and resigned people”.

He cited the freedoms given to free marketeers in Spain at the expense of ordinary workers, the Spanish political establishment’s support for the Maastricht treaty of European Union and its threat to workers’ prosperity, and Spain’s steps towards closer military integration in NATO.

Above all, Anguita condemns the government’s defiance of a court request to declassify secret files on the 1980s ‘dirty war’ against Basque separatist guerrillas.

The files allegedly document the former Socialist government’s involvement in the 1983-87 campaign, in which 27 were killed. The PCE says the PP government, like the Socialists before it, have breached the constitution by refusing to hand the files over.

If the PP and the Socialists will not respect the constitution, he argues, then his party need not feel required to stand by its continuance. The party reserved the right, he said, to consider alternatives.

“(King Juan Carlos) is not immune to criticism,” Anguita told a press conference Monday. “This is a constitutional democracy, not a theocracy, and the people are sovereign, not the monarch.”

He has alluded to claims that PP leader, prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, had been pressured by the King to keep the files under wraps and had ‘picked’ a new defence minister, Eduardo Serra, who could be relied on to keep them out of the court.

Journalists Pablo Sebastian and Javier Ortiz, writing in the Madrid daily El Mundo, have made similar suggestions and say Serra has become the main opponent of the documents’ release.

Aznar denies Serra was “chosen” by the king. Media quoted sources closer to the Palace who said Serra was not obviously friendly with the King and had never visited the royal residence before his appointment.

Anguita says the King had stepped beyond constitutional bounds by speaking in support of Spain’s full integration in NATO and commitment to the European Union. “On the issue of NATO, the best thing the king could have done was to shut up. And with Maastricht, shut up.

If the King feels he has to intervene in anything, he said, he should help ensure the courts functioned properly and fairly, he said in reference to the dirty war documents case. “If he can’t keep quiet about other issues, at least he could lend a hand to justice.”

Anguita is treading a tricky path. Support for the King is strong — opinion polls regularly place him as the country’s most trusted individual, far ahead of any of the party leaders.

When fascist dictator General Francisco Franco died in 1975, 36 years after overthrowing the Spanish Second Republic in 1939, the country stood behind the monarchy and King Juan Carlos to ensure a peaceful transition to democracy.

Under his eye, a constituent non-party, non-partisan parliament drew up a consensus constitution approved by referendum in December 1978 and Spain began its rapid and successful reintegration in Western Europe.

Madrid daily newspaper El Pais wrote that Anguita’s questioning of the monarchy had broken an unwritten rule accepted by the entire political establishment. A cartoon in El Mundo showed a relaxing Juan Carlos saying that Anguita’s republicanism was logical, “it was strange that there are so many red (communist) monarchists”.

But whatever his frustrations over the dirty war files and the expansive growth of Spanish capitalism, Anguita has raised two issues that the country cannot hope to avoid discussing sooner or later — federalism and self-determination.

The Constitution defines Spain as one united nation made up of autonomous communities. Self-determination is a taboo issue for the majority, not least because the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and the radical Basque separatists call for it.

The PSOE said that in all European nations where right to self- determination had been exercised, there had been violence. Caldera said Spain was very close to operating as a federal model, though this is not officially stated.

Anguita’s stance is seen as a means of consolidation his position of leader of the PCE, the third largest party in Spain, taking 10 percent of the vote in the last elections.

The party dominates the United Left opposition coalition, and the row has certainly weeded out his internal critics, including his predecessor as PCE leader, Santiago Carrillo, who endorsed the democratic transition on return from exile in 1977.

Anguita said Carrillo was “is out of orbit” and dismissed him as “a Spanish version of (Umberto) Bossi,” the Northern Italian separatist politician who “fights on, safe in the knowledge he has chance of ever achieving his objective.

In its editorial, El Pais redirected the analogy, comparing Anguita’s comments with Bossi’s weekend declaration of independence for the state of ‘Padania’ in the wealthy northern half of Italy.

“In both cases, there is a lot of bluffing involved,” it said, “but they are worrying, nevertheless.”