SPAIN: POLITICAL CHANGE IN THE POST-FRANCO ERA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP84S00895R000100020007-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 28, 2007
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: September 1, 1983
• Content Type: REPORT

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Secret
Directorate of
Intelligence
Secret
EUR 83-10220
DI 83-10024
September 1983
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Spain:
Political Change in
the Post-Franco Era
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Directorate of
Intelligence
Spain:
Political Change in
the Post-Franco Era
This paper was prepared byl Office of
European Analysis. Technical support was provided
the Directorate of Operations.
Comments and queries are welcome and may be
directed to the Chief, West European Division,
EURA,
Secret
EUR 83-10220
DI 83-10024
September 1983
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Spain:
Political Change in
the Post-Franco Era
Key Judgments An analysis of election and socioeconomic data for three national elections
Information available suggests that Felipe Gonzalez's Socialists are better positioned than the
as of 1 July 1983 parties of the right to appeal to the Spanish electorate over the next few
was used in this report.
years. Even the Communist Party seems better placed than the rightist
parties to mount the sort of consensus-based, broad-gauged campaign that
we think will be a prerequisite to winning a greater share of the vote.
The data indicate that the Socialists have developed a broad socioeconomic
base with its center in the moderate left. In the election of November 1982,
Gonzalez built on the breadth and basic moderation of his party's core
constituency to attract centrist voters looking for a new home after the
collapse of the governing Union of the Democratic Center (UCD). Elector-
al data indicate that about 3 million former UCD voters switched to the
Socialists-far more than moved to the parties of the right.
By contrast, the statistics suggest that the parties of the right and center
right suffer from being too closely identified with the Church in an era of
declining clericalism, and that they are having trouble bridging the gaps
among the various sorts of Spanish conservatives. Programs that appeal to
well-to-do city dwellers, for example, have little attraction for the small
agricultural proprietors of northern Spain, a bulwark of conservatism for
most of the past century. As a result, we believe Manuel Fraga's Popular
Alliance, by far the largest party on the right, will find it hard to expand
beyond the 26 percent of the vote it received both last November and in the
municipal elections in May. The parties between the Alliance and the
Socialists so far have had even more trouble establishing adequate political
bases.
We believe that to compete with the Socialists for the crucial center vote, a
party of the right or center right would have to avoid overt ties either to the
Church or to powerful economic interests. The ability of Spain's fractious
conservative politicians, with their long history of clientelism, to unite
behind such a formula probably will be a key to whether a credible
alternative to the Socialists will emerge before the elections that must be
held by 1986. For the present no such alternative is in sight.
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September 1983
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Spain: Results of Parliamentary Elections
Percent
50
1977
Socialist Workers
Party (PSOE)
Union of the Democratic Popular Alliance (AP)
Center (UCD)
Social Democratic
Center (CDS)
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Spain:
Political Change in
the Post-Franco Era
In the eight years since Franco's death, Spain has
experienced more fundamental and far-reaching
changes, both constitutionally and politically, than
any other West European country. A democratic
constitution has replaced a nondemocratic one; a
center-right political party-Adolfo Suarez's Union
of the Democratic Center (UCD)--briefly achieved
dominance and then vanished; and a center-left par-
ty-Felipe Gonzalez's Socialists (PSOE)-has
achieved a stronger position than that of the UCD in
its heyday. All these changes, moreover, have taken
place peacefully and constitutionally.
Perhaps the central issue in analyzing the Spanish
scene is whether such profound changes are likely to
continue. Obviously a host of factors bears on this
question: personalities, the economy, the attitudes of
the military and the King, the strength of separat-
ism-particularly in the Basque Country, and the
mood of the Spanish electorate.
Focusing on voter attitudes, we have conducted a
statistical analysis of trends in the three post-Franco
national elections. The results suggest that the
PSOE's hold is firmer than the UCD's ever was and
fiat both the PSOE and the Communists are better
positioned than the parties of the right to mount the
consensus-based, broad-gauged campaigns that are
likely to be most appealing to the present electorate.
The data indicate that the PSOE, whose share of the
vote climbed from 28 percent to 48 percent between
1977 and 1982 (figure), has developed a diverse
constituency. The party has consistently attracted
significant numbers of poor urban dwellers and Com-
munist trade unionists, but it also has developed a
following among voters in the traditionally conserva-
tive and poor rural provinces of northern Spain-
particularly those with scattered pockets of industry
such as Valladolid and Valencia. Emerging at the 25X1
same time has been a growing association between a
Spain's two labor federations.
vote for the PSOE and membership in the Socialist
trade union, the more responsible and pragmatic of
The picture emerging from these statistics is that of a
broadly based party with its center in the moderate
left. In 1982 Gonzalez built on the breadth and basic
moderation of his party's base to attract centrist
voters looking for a new home after the disintegration
of the UCD. According to the Spanish press, about
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3 million former UCD voters switched to the PSOE; a
far smaller number moved right to support Fraga's
Popular Alliance (AP). The Socialists kept most of
this constituency in the municipal elections last
spring, according to press reports; the modest decline
in the party's share of the vote was due to a partial re-
covery by the Communists.
Fratricidal internal conflict has tarnished the Com-
munist Party's public image, in our view, and contrib-
uted to the sharp drop in the party's share of the
national vote-from 11 percent in 1979 to 4 percent
in 1982. Election data suggest that the party retains
the support of an ideological, class-conscious core, but
the persistent leakage of votes to the PSOE suggests
that if the party is to regain its former strength, it
probably will have to compete with the Socialists-
that is, move toward the center. It would have trouble
retaining its more ideologically committed supporters
if it did so, but the election data suggest that it is
better positioned to make such a move than at any
time in the recent past because resistance to the party
among dedicated Catholics seems to be declining. As
recently as the 1979 elections, the vote tended to go
against the Communists in provinces with high levels
of church attendance, but in 1982 such resistance was
no longer statistically significant. (The decline in
opposition to the left among Catholics, of course, also
benefits the Socialists.) The data also suggest to us
that the Communists may be handicapped in their
competition with the Socialists by their relatively
greater identification with older voters.
Our conclusions concerning the variables affecting the
AP vote are more tenuous than for the other parties,
since we can account for less of the variation in the
party's electoral showing by our statistical analysis.
We think this result may be due partly to the AP's
identification with the Francoist era, which would let
it feed on a nostalgia cutting across classes and
regions. Such an important yet hard-to-measure fac-
tor is likely to lose importance with the passage of
time, in our opinion
The elections of 1977 and 1979 were disastrous for
the AP, mainly, in our view, because of the command-
ing position on the center right held by Suarez's
UCD. With the UCD's decline the AP gained 26
percent of the vote in 1982. It duplicated this showing
in the municipal elections last May, confirming its
position as Spain's second-largest party. Statistical
analysis suggests, however, that the party's centrist
rivals may be right when they contend that the AP
will never gain much more of the vote than this.
One reason for the party's cloudy prospects is the
difficulty of bridging the gaps among various kinds of
conservatives. Hoping to project a more forward-
looking image, Fraga and other AP leaders have
largely discarded the authoritarian, interventionist
approach of the Franco years and embraced a "new"
conservatism, which champions the free market and
pledges to cut back public expenditures. This line
appeals to relatively well-to-do and politically sophis-
ticated city dwellers, and, indeed, urbanization had
emerged by 1979 as a key predictor of the party's
vote. But such a program has much less appeal for the
small agricultural proprietors of northern Spain, a
bulwark of conservatism for most of the past century.
The AP's identification with the Church could be
another limiting factor. The association between the
Popular Alliance's vote and church attendance has
become statistically significant over the past six years.
Suarez's Social Democratic Center is the only other
party showing a similar connection. The AP probably
reinforced its clericalist base with recent strong stands
against the Socialist government's proposal to liberal-
ize the country's abortion laws, but polls indicate that
a majority of Spaniards support this measure. The
unpopularity of the AP's stance among non-Alliance
voters illustrates, in our view, the danger posed for the
party by close identification with the Church. Where-
as the Socialists and even the Communists have
managed to expand their potential electoral base by
shedding much of their past anticlerical image, the
Alliance may, we think, be reducing its appeal to
secularly minded voters by embracing Church-related
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issues too closely. Well-to-do, big city neighborhoods
like the Salamanca district in Madrid do have high
rates of church attendance and show strong support
for the AP. But they are a narrow base on which to
build a national party.
Strong identification with the Church, then, has
helped the Alliance shore up support from an impor-
tant constituency, but we believe this identification
will make it harder for the party to add significantly
to its electoral base in the future. The narrowness of
the Alliance's appeal partly explains one of the more
striking aspects of the 1982 election-the party's
inability to attract a significant number of centrist
voters away from the moribund UCD.
The Popular Alliance's dilemma becomes clearer
when the party's base of support is compared with
that of the UCD in 1977 and 1979. (The UCD's share
of the vote dropped to only 7 percent in 1982, and the
party was dissolved shortly thereafter.) The UCD had
managed to develop a broad (albeit shallow) interclass
appeal that largely accounted for its dominance in the
immediate post-Franco period. The data show a sig-
nificant association between support for it and rela-
tively low per capita income. The AP enjoys no such
association. This impression is reinforced by the elec-
tion results themselves, which show that the UCD did
best in 1979 in the traditional, less developed rural
areas of northern Spain.
Support for the UCD was not limited to rural areas.
Indeed, our data show an insignificant association
between the UCD vote and agricultural employment,
suggesting to us that the party did especially well
among urban nonelites-most likely the older genera-
tion of lower middle class shopkeepers, civil servants,
and office workers. Many in these groups had ad-
vanced under the Franco system about as far in life as
they ever would. While welcoming the new demo-
cratic order, they probably did not want a government
that would move too far or too fast. In addition,
although UCD voters-urban and rural-tended not
to be rich, there is tenuous statistical evidence of a
negative association between the party's vote totals
and unemployment. To the extent that this association
is valid, it indicates that UCD voters tended to be
relatively secure in their station in life. The election
returns themselves suggested in 1979 that most UCD
voters lived outside both the larger northern industrial
cities and the parts of the rural south where social and
political conflict was more salient.
The UCD's collapse and the inability of the AP to
pick up the pieces have focused political speculation in
Spain on the possible emergence of a new center-right
party. Suarez himself was trying to create such an
organization in 1982 when he launched the Social
Democratic Center Party (CDS). The CDS, however,
won less than 3 percent of the national vote. Suarez
publicly blamed this largely on his late start.
Suarez did manage to attract some rural support, as
was evident in the significant association between
employment in agriculture and the CDS vote. In
much of the countryside, and particularly among
older voters, issues count for less than personalities.
Moreover, Suarez had-according to opinion polls-
name recognition and acceptance unmatched by any
politician except Socialist leader Felipe Gonzalez. The
explanatory value of agricultural employment for the
CDS vote, however, also probably reflects the party's
strong showing in rural Avila-Suarez's home prov-
ince and one of only two to return a CDS deputy to
parliament.
The party's reliance on well-to-do voters was, in our
view, more important. We regard it as a main cause of
the party's poor performance; it stands in marked
contrast to the appeal of the UCD in its prime. In
fact, the CDS in 1982 was the only party to register a
statistically significant positive association with rela-
tively high provincial per capita income.'
' Although the Popular Alliance also appeared to draw support
from well-to-do voters, the relationship was less significant statisti-
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Further narrowing the CDS's base was a close associ-
ation between the party's vote and church attendance,
a linkage it shared only with the Popular Alliance.
This association is especially striking because Suarez
had not been a champion of Church interests in the
past and ran a secular campaign in 1982. The strong
association between church attendance and support
for the CDS is probably in large part a function of the
narrowness of the group from which the party drew its
support. This group apparently believed in the need
for greater reform than was likely under either the AP
or the UCD, but it was still reluctant-as a result
either of religious conviction or of personal political
tradition-to trust either of the leftist parties.
With such a narrow base of support, it is not surpris-
ing that the CDS did poorly in 1982. We think Suarez
could have trouble holding on even to the minimal
backing he received in 1982 if Gonzalez manages
both to stay on a middle-of-the-road course and to
achieve an understanding with the Church.
In sum, our regression analyses suggest that both the
Socialists and the Communists have developed in-
creasingly diversified bases of support in recent years.
As late as 1979, class consciousness and religious self-
identification still fostered political cleavages that
reinforced the minority status of both parties. We
think the Socialists' ability to transcend those divi-
sions was an important factor in the party's victory in
1982 and that the interest of party leaders in main-
taining that support will be a continuing force for
moderate policies. Their drift toward the center,
moreover, creates an opportunity for the Communists
to reach out to their right to attract Socialist leftwing-
ers dissatisfied with the shift in their party's direction.
To date, leadership problems and intense factionalism
have prevented the Communists from taking advan-
tage of this opportunity. In our view, the party's
modest recovery in the local elections earlier this year
probably represented an inevitable flowing back to the
party of some committed Communists who voted
Socialist last fall out of a sense of frustration with
their own party and a desire to see a leftwing
government in power. Similarly, the party may expe-
rience further gains down the line that would bring it
closer to the 10 to 11 percent of the vote it has
commanded since the return of democracy. We doubt,
though, that present or potential Communist leaders
have the imagination or the flexibility to attract
electorally significant numbers of disgruntled Social-
to fill the gap between left and right
Our analyses suggest that the center and right-of-
center parties are in no better position to cut into the
Socialist electorate:
? For a time the UCD maintained broad geographic
and interclass support, but the party had largely
disintegrated by 1982.
? The AP had trouble attracting the UCD's support-
ers; our data suggest this was because its brand of
conservatism appealed to a narrower segment of the
electorate.
? Suarez's new CDS, for its part, failed to develop
enough appeal to the urban middle and lower classes
Most of these trends carried over into the local
government elections of 8 May, when the AP failed to
expand further toward the center and the CDS lost
nearly half of the modest vote it had attracted in the
fall. According to the press, the difficulties of both the
AP and the CDS have set off a scramble among
moderate center-right politicians to create a party
that will allow them to compete with the Socialists for
the crucial center vote.
Our data indicate that to gain a following among the
nonelites-whose support is essential to electoral suc-
cess, a party should avoid overt ties either to the
Church or to powerful economic interests. The ability
of Spain's fractious right-of-center politicians, with
their long history of clientelism, to unite behind such
a formula probably will be a key factor in deciding
whether the country will have a credible electoral
alternative to the Socialists in the parliamentary
election that must be held by 1986. For the present
such an alternative to Socialist rule is nowhere in
sight.
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