Decline & Fall?

The next dictator to fall"or the one after the next"may be Spain's Francisco Franco. Spain's political exiles, down the long list of factions from Monarchists to Communists, last week made plans on the hope that the decline of Hitler and the fall of Mussolini would pave the way for them to unseat Franco.

In Mexico ambitious Diego Martinez-Barrio, last president of Spain's Republican Cortes, presided over a meeting of four factions: Izquierda Republicana (Republican Left), Union Republicana, Catalana Esquerra (Catalan Left), Partido Nacionalista Basco (Basque Nationalists). Main agreement: that the last president of the Republican Cortes will decide when to re-establish the Republican Government in Spain. But absent from the meeting were the followers of Juan Negrin, Socialist last Premier of Republican Spain, now in England, as well as powerful other Socialist and Communist groups.

In Britain rumor said that the Franco Government's promonarchist Ambassador, the Duke of Alba (TIME, July 5), was touting restoration of the Spanish Bourbons. Reported The Week: Spanish monarchists had decided not to seek to replace Caudillo Franco from within but to work from abroad through influential friends in England and the U.S.

Many realists among Republican exiles felt certain that the time was far from ripe for practical action. London and Washington still stood on good diplomatic terms with Madrid. Unless they were ready to add intervention in Spain to their other problems, there was little they could yet do to bring to pass Socialist Leader Indalecio Prieto's modest proposal: that the Spanish people, in accordance with the Atlantic Charter, be allowed freely to elect their own government.

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