Spain Star Appeal

By Michael S. Serrill

When Felipe Gonzalez Marquez's Socialists swept to power in 1982, a jubilant crowd of 4,000 supporters held a raucous celebration outside the party's election headquarters in Madrid. Fearing a violent rightist reaction, Gonzalez urged his supporters to keep cool, saying, "We don't want any saviors with machine guns." Some went to bed that night fearing that the army might try to seize power.

Last week, when the Socialists handily won a second term in office, the scene was almost tranquil. Fewer than 200 supporters gathered outside the same election headquarters in the Palace Hotel, and only one, a woman clutching a fistful of red roses, shouted the old political war cry, "Felipe, Felipe! Felipe Presidente!" The postelection calm was briefly broken Wednesday when a bomb exploded in checked luggage at the Madrid terminal of El Al, the Israeli airline, injuring 13 people, two of them seriously.

Once a land of repressive dictatorship, Spain is taking its ten-year-old democracy in stride. The old political extremes have largely evaporated, and the majority has steadily moved toward the center. The ruling Socialists have also shifted, abandoning their calls for radical social change. In his campaign, Gonzalez, 44, calmly asked for four more years to consolidate his party's gains.

Spaniards responded by giving the Socialists 44% of the vote and 184 seats in the 350-member lower house of parliament. While the seat total was 18 fewer than in the 1982 landslide, the party kept its legislative majority. "These results confirm that we have been following the right track," said Gonzalez. Yet the party's swerve toward the center created some doubters. Many of the lost Socialist seats were picked up by the Democratic and Social Center Party of Adolfo Suarez, which boosted its representation from two seats to 19. Suarez, the first elected Prime Minister after the 1975 death of the dictator General Francisco Franco, headed a cautious center-right government. He has since moved to the left of Gonzalez on some issues, and campaigned on a platform calling for the closing of all four U.S. military bases in Spain.

The Socialist victory was largely a tribute to the charismatic Gonzalez, who has become one of the brightest stars in Europe's political firmament. Though voters no longer squeal like groupies when the graying-at-the-temples Prime Minister takes a podium, he retains magnetic appeal. "There is less emotionalism than before," says a senior foreign ministry official. "But he can still convince the man in the street." Gonzalez did that last March, when he persuaded a skeptical electorate to vote to keep Spain in NATO.

The Prime Minister has maintained his popularity despite a Spanish unemployment rate of 22%. His moderate, centrist economic policy "frightens absolutely no one," as one observer put it. The Socialists have refrained from nationalizing any industries or banks and have even sold some state-owned firms to private interests. Moreover, Spaniards accept the government's promise that modernization and membership in the European Community, which Spain joined in January, will mean future prosperity.

But perhaps Gonzalez's greatest achievement has been to bring Spain into the European political mainstream. Said Jean Enkaoua, special correspondent of the French daily Le Dauphine Libere: "Spanish elections are no longer the stuff of passion and risk."

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Madrid