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Felipe Gonzalez: Decisive Leader
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18856 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1991 |
1,590 Words |
| Author
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Stanley G. Payne
Stanley G. Payne is Hilldale Professor of History at the
University of Wisconsin. He has authored several studies of
Spanish history. |
Felipe Gonzalez, prime minister of Spain since 1982, has been the most successful electoral politician in the country's history. When his Socialist Party won an absolute parliamentary majority in the October 1982 elections, he began something that no other party has ever done in the brief history of either the first or second Spanish democracies. He will soon complete an uninterrupted decade as premier. Such longevity is no more remarkable than the changes that have taken place in his own outlook, his party and his government's policies during these years; his own Socialist Party has moved from being the most left-wing in western Europe to what some observes now term the most conservative.
Though it is the oldest of all Spanish political parties, dating from 1879, the Socialist Party has had a checkered and frustrating history. It first rose to prominence in the democratic republic after 1931, only to split in half, a major sector undergoing what it liked to call "Bolshevization," adopting a revolutionary and provocative stance that helped spark the civil war of 1936. In that conflict some Socialists behaved more like Leninists than social democrats, participating in numerous forced collectivizations and widespread political executions before succumbing to total military defeat. As a clandestine organization under the long Franco dictatorship, the party reverted to its more moderate position of early years, but played a less active role in the opposition than did communists and anarchists. It was severely divided internally, the official leadership having long remained in the hands of elderly exiles in France who had lost touch with the rapidly changing and modernizing society inside Spain. A new chapter in the party's history began in 1974, a year before Franco's death, when a coalition of young militants from inside Spain, led by a 32 year old Gonzalez, won control of the party leadership at a congress in France.
The Education of Felipe Gonzalez
Felipe Gonzalez was born in Seville in 1942. His father, a native of northern Spain, had moved to Andalusia before the civil war and was mobilized into Franco's army during the civil war. Austere, hardworking, and essentially apolitical, the elder Gonzalez eventually became a prosperous middle-class cattle rancher who gave his children every necessary advantage. Young Gonzalez earned a law degree and also studied for a year on a Catholic scholarship in Belgium, his sole experience with a foreign language or culture. His first political affiliation was with young Catholic progressives. Soon he moved into the clandestine socialist opposition and began professional life as a
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