Spanish Communists Losing Heroic Luster : Revered During Franco’s Last Years, Party Now Divided and Diminished by Vicious Infighting

Santiago Carrillo, the 70-year-old Communist who fought against Gen. Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, strode down the street beneath the red banners of the Spanish Communist Party on a Sunday last May, joining thousands of leftists and pacifists in a demonstration.

Far behind came a second cluster of Communists. Waving similar red banners, they were led by 39-year-old Gerardo Iglesias, the dapper, heavily mustached former miner who has succeeded Carrillo as secretary general of the party.

The separation was not accidental. Carrillo and Iglesias do not march together any more. They are in fact bitter enemies. Iglesias, selected as secretary general two years ago by Carrillo himself, has purged Carrillo from all positions of influence and power in the party.

In turn, Carrillo, who directed an underground struggle against the dictator Franco for three decades, has accused some of those who voted for his expulsion from the Central and Executive committees in April of being former members of the Franco’s fascist Falange.

Scathing Attack

“Instead of spending their nights studying Marx and Engels,” Carrillo said in a scathing attack on the new party leaders, “they dedicate their nights to getting drunk in nightclubs.”

There have been reports of overtures from Carrillo to Iglesias and from both of them to the leaders of other breakaway Communist parties to form some kind of common platform for the campaign against Premier Felipe Gonzalez and his Socialists in the parliamentary elections scheduled for next year. But none of this hints at any real reconciliation. Instead, the overtures sound like the desperate cries of warring chieftains who know they have no alternative but to come together in the face of a more powerful common enemy.

The Communist Party of Spain, which had a heroic appeal to leftists and liberals in the last years of the Franco dictatorship, is now divided and diminished, too weak to make much of an impact on modern, democratic Spain.

Analysts disagree on whether the party has any hope in the long run of improving its sorry state. The immediate future promises little but more trouble, especially if Carrillo decides to lead his followers out of the party.

Carrillo, who says that “two distinct parties now exist within the Spanish Communist Party,” has not explicitly threatened to walk out. But he has told the Spanish news magazine Cambio 16 that he intends “to contribute all my force to the relaunching of an authentic Spanish Communist Party.” With little leverage to do this from inside the party, Carrillo may have to go outside instead.

The party has already been badly torn. In 1981, a group of Catalans opposed to the anti-Soviet, Eurocommunist line taken by Carrillo broke from the once-powerful Catalan branch of the party. In 1984, a large group with similar pro-Soviet views defected from the national party to form a new Communist Party.

New Movement

More recently, Ramon Tamames, a former Communist leader popular with young Spaniards in the first years after the death of Franco, founded a new political movement called the Progressive Federation.

The splits and bitterness obviously stem from the woeful showing of the Communists in the last parliamentary elections in 1982. The party won less than 4% of the total national vote and took only four of the 248 seats in the Congress of Deputies. All polls indicate that the party could not do much better now.

Little of this could be predicted in 1977 when Prime Minister Adolfo Suarez, the youthful bureaucrat selected by King Juan Carlos to lead the transition from the dictatorship, decided to overrule the objections of the army and legalize the Communist Party in time for Spain’s first democratic elections in 40 years. Carrillo, released from a short stay in prison, suddenly became a kind of cover boy of the Spanish press. Every Spanish journalist seemed to want to interview him.

For years, the Franco regime had painted the Communists as ogres, and many Spaniards were surprised to find that Carrillo was a man with an avuncular manner, a professed admiration for the king, shrewd political judgment and a good deal of public contempt for the Soviet Union.

Carrillo muted his party’s militancy and often cooperated with Suarez during the transition. Many Spanish analysts, in fact, believe that Carrillo’s cooperation was one of the factors that made the transition so smooth.

Carrillo and the Communists hoped for a good deal of Spanish gratitude, both for their fight against Franco and for their cooperation during the transition. However, in the first elections, in 1977, they received only 9% of the vote, far less than they had expected. They raised this a bit, to almost 11% in 1979, but then dropped drastically in 1982.

This terrible showing put so much pressure on Carrillo that he resigned, making way for his protege Iglesias. Carrillo obviously hoped that Iglesias might be something of a puppet. That hope faded and, in a matter of months, Carrillo was attacking his successor.

Ironically, Carrillo’s main ideological complaint now is that Iglesias has become too much of a Eurocommunist. The struggle, though, is more generational and personal than ideological.

Several forces combined to weaken the party in the last few years. First of all, Carrillo was probably the wrong leader for the party after the death of Franco. Despite his sympathetic manner, Carrillo was a holdover from the Spanish Civil War, trying to win support at a time when most Spaniards wanted to put the 1936-1939 war far behind them.

As a young official during the defense of Madrid, he ordered the evacuation of 200 Francoist prisoners from Madrid to Valencia. All were executed on the way. Carrillo denies that he intentionally sent the prisoners to their deaths, but he has not been able to shake off the party’s wartime reputation.

On top of this, Carrillo, while trying to persuade Spaniards that the Communist Party believed in and practiced democracy, ruled the party with steel-like authority, expelling anyone who stood in his way. This made it difficult to trust his professions of belief in democracy.

Even more important, neither the Communists nor anyone else in Spain foresaw the enormous popularity of Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, the young leader of the Socialist Party. Gonzalez was a little-known labor lawyer when Franco died in 1976. Within a few years, his dynamic campaigning attracted huge crowds and many votes, and the Communists soon found that the Socialists were winning over most of the voters of the left and almost as many of the center. There was little left for the Communists.

In a sense, the surge of Gonzalez’s popularity pushed the Communists back to their traditional role in Spanish politics. The Communists were not a powerful electoral force before the Civil War. But their organizational abilities carried them to great influence during the war, and their underground battle against Franco gave them added prestige after the war.

Once Franco was dead, though, leftist Spanish voters, impressed with the dynamic new leader of the Socialist Party and turned off by the old warrior of the Communist Party, returned to their old habit of voting far more for the Socialist Party than the Communist Party.

There are two contradictory views now about the future of the Communist Party. Many analysts believe that the party cannot recover from its weakness and divisions. Others insist that the Communists must not be counted out.

“I believe that the Communists will have a role to play,” a thoughtful Socialist government official said in a recent conversation. “I have always said that the political danger to Felipe Gonzalez is not on his right but on his left. As he governs and seems more and more a politician of the center, there will be disappointment among some voters of the left. They will be attracted by a Communist Party that is attacking him.”