WINDS OF CHANGE 

MANY THOUGHT IT WAS A QUIXOTIC DREAM, BUT MODERN DEMOCRACY IS BLOWING AWAY THE DARK SIDE OF OLD SPAIN

BY ROD USHER

The quixotic ideal requires more capacity to dream than to rationalize, but fate sometimes lends a hand, and the unlikely happens. This is the case with the land of Cervantes' hero: Spain has beaten the odds, crossing from dictatorship to democracy without the spilling of blood. In Madrid today, 450 years after Cervantes was born, a bronze statue of the author stands just across the road from the doors of a freely elected national parliament.

Were he riding today, Don Quixote would scratch his beard at the sight of windmills much taller than the aliens he attacked. The blades of sleek aerogenerators dotted around Spain are expected to be meeting the electricity needs of about 10% of the population by the end of next year. Apart from such examples of new technology, he would encounter a society which--after intervening centuries of conquest and being conquered, of rule by monarchs, republicans and despots--is now firmly established within a union of modern European democracies.

The man from La Mancha would, of course, note some apparent incongruities. He might wonder at a people overseen by a king who was chosen by a dictator and required to jump his own father in the line to a restored throne--a king who nevertheless is probably the most popular public figure in the country, the head of a model, scandal-free royal family. As evidence that democracy forever falls short of utopia, Quixote might also notice that on a bench alongside the statue of his creator an old woman can be found sleeping at night, her worldly possessions in an array of shopping bags. About the same distance from her bench as is the parliament stands the Palace Hotel, where a mere knight could not afford many nights at $3,300 a day for the most expensive suite.

Yet this vision of modern Spain would not have been available to the lovable if loopy lancer had he reappeared not much more than 20 years ago. Then, a married woman could not open a bank account in her own name; politics were best discussed in whispers; and a member of the black-hatted Guardia Civil would order a Catalan-speaking citizen in Barcelona to "Use the Christian language!" Failure to switch to Spanish could mean a trip to the carcel. The smoke from the civil war that devastated Spain from 1936 to 1939 did not really clear until November 1975, when the seemingly interminable, often repressive rule of its victor, General Francisco Franco, ended with his death.

That Spain has come so far since then seems remarkable to everyone but the Spanish. Madrid-based film maker Carlos Saura, who the year before Franco's death won the best director award at Cannes for La Prima Angelica, thinks the generation that makes change "is never the one that appreciates how far it has gone." Says Saura, now 65 and whose latest film, Pajarico, won an award at the Montreal festival in September, "All societies are imperfect; the German, the French, not to mention the American. Having said that, I like this country we have constructed in the past 20 years."

Spain's Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar Lopez, agrees that Spaniards "are very self-critical," but Aznar's reaching the highest office last year was itself proof of the solidity of the system they have adopted. His government is the first by a party of the right since the transition. The change of political gears from the long-running Socialist leadership was as smooth as in any democracy, never mind that the label derecha (right) remains synonymous with dictatorship for many older Spaniards.

While Spain has been reinventing itself politically, it has also been transforming its way of doing business. A centralized, introverted economy controlled rigidly from Madrid has broken open into one that is regional, outward-looking, increasingly deregulated, and right now running hot. Spain has some manufacturing depth--it is Europe's fourth-biggest carmaker--but its entrepreneurial success comes primarily from being a nation of PYMES, the acronym for small and medium-sized businesses. Many of these are within the number one industry, tourism, which each year sees Spain's 39 million inhabitants outnumbered by foreign vacationers.

One indicator of the drive behind the economic upswing is that Spaniards are again conquering Latin America, this time in Armani rather than armor. They are doing deals with Brazilians, Argentines and Chileans, and feeling "like Pedro in his house," their expression for being completely comfortable. It's a term used by Juan Villalonga, head of Spain's biggest multinational company, Telefonica de Espana, who says that even before the crisis among the Asian "tigers" Latin America was a much more attractive market. "Latin American countries are following orthodox economic policies, inflation is being controlled and they are in a process of liberalization and deregulation," says Villalonga. "Brazil is a bigger market than France, Italy and the U.K. combined."

Steering the economic ship is Rodrigo Rato, whose donnish appearance and fluent English make him seem more a British chancellor of the exchequer than a Spanish economy minister. He says Spain is a certainty to enter the first round of European monetary union in 1999 as it already more than meets the main Maastricht Treaty criteria--a deficit at 2.2%, inflation down to 2.1%, and a descending public debt.

Rato is not short of numbers to show how well Spain is doing. "Of all the employment created in Europe in 1997, half of it is happening in Spain--some 335,000 jobs out of 700,000." While that has to be seen in the context of the European Union's highest level of unemployment, Rato also points out: "This year Spain will have grown a third as much again as the European average--with inflation as low as Germany's--and our exports are up by 16%." He adds: "Importantly, we do not have the social rigidities of other countries; there is a very high level of dialogue between unions, business and government."

Social and cultural change has also altered the face of Spain. The Roman Catholicism that once saturated its art, literature and daily life has receded since the departure of Franco who, in his death throes, lay surrounded by the best doctors but clinging to relics of saints. In one survey, 72% of Spaniards describe themselves as practicing or non-practicing Catholics, but only about a quarter of this number accept the infallibility of the Pope, and fewer than a third think the Devil exists.

There are other indicators of this secularization. In 1979, the Center for Sociological Investigations calculated that 60% of Spaniards opposed legalization of abortion; 15 years later, slightly more than that percentage supported its decriminalization. The National Institute of Statistics counted 33,104 divorces in Spain in 1995, a one-third increase in five years, and Spain now shares with Italy Europe's lowest birth rate.

From another perspective--street level--Spain is also a different country. Its cities, while maintaining much of their architectural beauty and cafe ambience, are becoming increasingly gridlocked and noisy. The booming economy will see a record one million new cars sold this year, but modernization of the national fleet has done little to lower horrifying accident statistics. In the peak holiday month of August 489 people died on Spain's roads, 72 more than in the same month last year.

Millions of tourists, unsilenced motorcycles and the Latin tendency to hit the horn at the slightest delay help make noise levels hazardous in many cities. One study shows that more than half the facades of Spanish residential buildings receive daytime decibels above the World Health Organization's recommended limit, and nearly three quarters of them exceed the nighttime limit. In a letter to a newspaper last month a resident of Palma, on the island of Majorca, asked whether the ability to hold a conversation without shouting, to hear a cricket sing, or simply to sleep shouldn't be questions of national interest.

Some things are slow to change. Spaniards remain less likely than other Europeans to put old people or intellectually disabled family members into institutions. The young typically continue to live with their parents longer than people in northern Europe. But it is not certain whether this is a matter of strong family values or economic necessity. A cartoon in the national newspaper El Pais showed a stubbled man sitting at a kitchen table saying: "I'm 30 and I still live in my parents' house...there's no way to get them to leave."

For all the changes, life in modern Spain is far from plain sailing for many, and the arrival of democracy has done little to overcome unemployment, terrorism, corruption, and lack of confidence in the judiciary.

No one agrees on how to count Spain's jobless. One set of figures, based on a regular survey of 60,000 households, indicates about 20% unemployment. Another set of numbers, those who actually register at the National Employment Institute, is now around 13%. The difference in terms of pain is huge: the survey puts more than three million people out of work; the register says it's now more like two million.

Either way, Joaquin Almunia Amann, leader of the opposition Socialist Party, the PSOE, calls it a barbaridad. "The level of male employment above the age of 30 is much the same as in other comparable countries," says Almunia, "but while female unemployment is slowly coming down, the situation is really grave for young people."

In some parts of Spain, such as the southern city of Cadiz, youth unemployment exceeds 45%. An example of the pressure on those looking for work came in May this year when the former World Expo city of Seville advertised for 82 permanent jobs as council laborers. There were 12,396 applicants.

The upward surge in unemployment began after the oil shock in the mid-'70s and continued under the Socialist leadership of Almunia's predecessor, Felipe Gonzalez, who governed from 1982 to 1996. Gonzalez, who stepped down as party leader in June, says some of the causes are peculiar to newly democratic Spain: "We had two million women come into the labor market; Spain's baby boom arrived 15 years later than in the rest of Europe; our entry to the Common Market caused the transfer of one million people from agriculture into other sectors; and we saw the return of people who wanted to come home plus the pressure, for the first time, of immigration." Economy Minister Rato says continuing problems include Spain's high level of seasonal work--double the rest of Europe's--and its low level of people on part-time contracts--half the European average.

Spain's other running sore is terrorism. The Basque separatist group ETA has been bombing, shooting and kidnapping for decades, claiming about 800 lives and maiming more. In Basque cities such as Bilbao and San Sebastian, ETA-sponsored youths often spend their nights hurling Molotov cocktails at the offices of political parties, libraries, phone boxes, and at the police who try to stop them.

The general rejection of terror was proved in July when, police estimate, nearly six million Spaniards took to the nation's streets after ETA executed a young Basque town councillor, Miguel Angel Blanco. But this enormous gesture of solidaridad against ETA and its political wing, Herri Batasuna, has not stopped the killings. As Gonzalez says, "To have been able to provoke a reaction of this dimension, according to ETA's perverse reality, is a success." Prime Minister Aznar says, "I will never accept that via violence you can gain a political advantage." That view has the backing of the main political parties, but it leaves the solution to terrorism in the hands of the security forces. Although tainted by an earlier "dirty war" against ETA, they have had some success against the group this year. Security forces alone, however, appear no more likely to defeat terror in Spain than in Israel or Algeria.

Corruption is another plague. The most spectacular examples have been the near-collapse of one of the country's biggest banks, Banco Espanol de Credito, because of alleged misdeeds of its former president, Mario Conde Conde, and the bizarre tale of the former head of the Guardia Civil, ,Luis Roldan Ibanez. Now being tried on charges involving huge sums in Swiss bank accounts, Roldan was on the run for 11 months before he was finally tracked down to Laos and brought back to Spain.

The Spanish judiciary, as happened in Italy, has become tarred by politics. Gonzalez has referred to some judges as "brainless," and Julio Anguita Gonzalez, the leader of the United Left--an increasingly disunited group dominated by the Communist Party--labelled one judge, without naming him, a "presumed delinquent."

Cervantes had Don Quixote say to his sidekick Sancho Panza that laws should be pragmatic, few, and obeyed, but the advice is not always followed in Spain. An indication of the need for change is that a recent document on legal reform prepared by the country's top judicial authority translates not as a "white paper" but a "white book." Manuel Lozano-Higuero, professor of procedural law at the University of Cantabria, in the northern city of Santander, highlights abuse of accion popular, which allows people to be party to a court case whether or not they have a clear connection to it. Lozano-Higuero says a measure designed to protect public interest is "being put to spurious use by private and political interests." Opposition leader Almunia agrees. "Some political parties are using the tribunals to pursue their adversaries," he says. "There are relationships between some politicians and some judges which are causing scandal, in some cases also mixed in with media and economic interests. Simultaneously, there is a judicialization of politics by so-called star judges who feel the 'obligation' to oversee the legislative and executive powers."

Some of these cracks in the facade of democracy go back to what is known as the "two Spains," a historical divide that runs far deeper than the left/right splits of most democracies. English hispanophile and author V.S. Pritchett, who died this year, said the national character is caught between contradictory attraction to both despotism and anarchy. Pritchett wrote Marching Spain back in 1928, and The Spanish Temper appeared in 1954, but Madrid-based historian Javier Tusell says the classic division is still evident. An indicator, he says, is that as recently as 1986--the 50th anniversary of the start of the civil war--polls showed that a high proportion of supporters of the Popular Alliance--the precursor of today's governing Popular Party--continued to think Franco was right to want to overthrow an elected government. "Although you can't translate that to today, I think it's an indication of the two-Spains inheritance," says Tusell. "Another example is that [Prime Minister] Aznar was a falangist. It would be difficult to imagine someone becoming president of France who had been a supporter of Petain." (Perhaps something of Franco rubbed off on Marshall Petain: he was ambassador to Spain when, in 1940, he was called home, later leading the collaborationist Vichy government.) Tusell argues that some of the policies of today's P.P. government contribute to this continuing image of "two Spains." He cites what he sees as the P.P.'s effort to control the media, particularly television. "All of the big programs in public television have been put into the hands of supporters of Aznar," says Tusell. "You could say the P.P. has learned the worst vices of the Socialists when they were in government, but the difference is that the Socialists did it with an advantage of four million votes and an atmosphere of pro-Socialist fervor. These people are doing it with an advantage of only 300,000 votes over the Socialists, which contributes to this division and confrontation."

But for all Spaniards' atavistic ways, there is tangible evidence that the old, introverted Spain, isolated from Europe and the rest of the world for much of this century, has gone for good. While it is still serving an apprenticeship at democracy, Spain is now a significant exporter of some of its tenets. The secretary-general of NATO is a Spaniard. So are the president of the European Parliament, the E.U.'s negotiator between Benjamin Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat, its representative in Bosnia Herzegovina, and the director-general of UNESCO. Extrovert Spain can also boast two-thirds of the Three Tenors, some of the best long-distance runners, cyclists and tennis players, plus a plethora of internationally known dancers and writers. Spaniards are making nearly 65,000 cars a year for Mercedes-Benz, they are running bus services in Beijing, and are the biggest foreign bankers in Latin America. Even the man at the helm of New York City's Health and Hospitals Corporation is Spanish-born Luis Rojas Marcos, a psychiatrist from Seville.

Next year marks three important anniversaries for Spain. It will be a century since the "Year of the Disaster," the humiliation of 1898 when the Spanish empire lost its last colonial jewels: Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Next year also marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who wrote so potently of Spain as a land of beauty and blood, and who was executed by firing squad in Granada in the first year of the civil war. As well as such charged memories, Spain will have another, happier anniversary in 1998: its democratic constitution turns 20. It's a birthday the rest of of Europe will pass by, but this young constitution signifies a sea change many people, Spaniards included, thought to be an impossible dream. What has happened is summed up in a saying the eccentric old dreamer Don Quixote was fond of four centuries ago: Una puerta se cierra, otra se abre. For Spain, one door has shut, another has opened.