When Aznar took over the PP leadership in 1990, the party was still tainted as the party of Francoism. Aznar knew he had to change that. He federalized the party so that it reflected the reality, enshrined in the 1978 Constitution, that Spain is “a nation of nations,” in the words of the political analyst Emilio Lamo. So in Catalonia, one of Spain’s 17 largely self-governing “autonomous regions,” the PP’s regional organization came to be known by its name in Catalan. The symbolism was important: the PP was pledging allegiance to the post-Franco Constitution. Aznar also purged the party of Franco stalwarts. In 1996, Aznar was asked if there was not “a whole Jurassic Park” of hard-line right-wingers hiding behind him. He didn’t smile. “In Spain,” he said, “the far right no longer exists.”
Increasingly, that is true. Aznar himself was relatively young–a university student–when Franco died. Aznar told NEWSWEEK in a recent interview that the March election showed that Spain reached “a new level of political maturity.” He added: “The past is in the past for good.” In contrast with his isolationist party ancestors, Aznar, 47, is very much a man of the new Europe (when he and his friend British Prime Minister Tony Blair are together, they speak French). Under Aznar, Spain joined Europe’s single currency. Like Blair and many other post-ideological European leaders, Aznar consciously drove his party toward the center during the 1990s. Aznar’s outward blandness has been an effective cover for real, even radical, reform. He has privatized state industries, trimmed unemployment, begun to reform labor laws and presided over record levels of economic growth. But he has done this without the personalismo–the cult of personality–that has infected much of Spanish history.
Not many countries have had to climb out of history’s cellar the way Spain did. Forty years of Franco, says John Carlin, an Anglo-Spanish journalist who lives in Barcelona and writes for the newspaper El Pais, “poured a giant slab of cement over the body and soul of Spain.” Spain was a closed, bleakly authoritarian society that many citizens yearned to escape. Alberto Letona, now the director of a Basque cultural foundation, remembers, “When I was 18 years old and went to England, I breathed freedom.” For a newspaper to even print the word “strike” was forbidden, says Felipe Sahagun, a columnist. In the post-Franco transition to full democracy and then during 14 cathartic years of Felipe Gonzalez, Spain flourished as a newly open society, bursting with civil liberties, libertinism and artistic ferment.
It took the years of the first Aznar government to complete Spain’s transition to a modern, economically vibrant society. When the PP won the 1996 election but needed a coalition to put together a majority, Aznar, nervous and twitchy, looked like the loser. “Never has a defeat been so sweet,” Gonzalez said at the time. Aznar is looking much more confident these days. Asked in the interview about one of the biggest problems facing Spain–a long-festering terrorist movement in the Basque country–Aznar responded with something verging on sang-froid. The armed separatists of ETA will have to surrender; when they do, the government “will know how to be generous.” To Aznar’s critics this seems a dangerously hard-line stance in dealing with what Sahagun says is Spain’s “Achilles’ heel.”
A newer, more widespread problem is immigration. As immigrants–many of them illegal and from North Africa–flow into a country that used to be a net exporter of people, there have been occasionally ugly clashes with the local populations. The government has managed to contain the trouble, but Spain’s image and its increasingly profitable niche as Europe’s year-round garden will suffer if there is more violence. Perhaps understandably, for all his brimming-over confidence, Aznar is not averse to hedging his bets. He wears two South American string bracelets, one on each wrist. He laughed when asked about them: “They’re to ward off evil spirits.” So far, so good.
