Francoist referendum flop

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Spanish police on the rampage in the Basque town of Renteria campaign waged by the national rights. the reformists and the less than half the pointed statements in opposition not only to more military spending but to outside interference in Romanian affairs. He spoke of the "sacred right" of every nation to decide its own destiny.

Neither the National Assembly nor the meeting of 3,000 party members who pointedly applauded Ceasescu's words, represent any real mass support for the nepotistic bureaucracy in Romania.

No vestige of workers' democracy is permitted under the dictatorial rule of Ceacescu and his family and his friends.

Popular backing

But it was no doubt in an effort to seek popular backing that Ceasescu publicly linked his opposition to more military spending to the need to spend money instead on the domestic economic needs of Romania.

It is this contradiction which equally faces all the East European Stalinist búreaucracies including that of the USSR-especially when in the same week Brezhnev was forced • to admit that many of the major economic targets of the tenth Soviet Five Year Plan will not be fulfilled and when as a result of similar failures the Bulgarian leaders had to announce the abandonment of long term In spite of an 1l to l majority for the new constitution, last week's referendum in Spain is proving to be a serious embarassment' to the Francoist regime.

The Suarez government and its Socialist and Communist Party allies were predicting that their massive propaganda campaign for a 'yes' vote would get at least 80% of the population to participate in the referendum.

In fact, however, almost one third of the electorate stayed away from the polls -many more than in the December 1976 referendum or in the elections of June 1977.

Irregularities

It is impossible to put an exact figure on the proportion of abstentions, since the Ministry of the Interior doesn't seem even to know how many voters there are on the rolls!

As in the parliamentary elections last year, countless examples of electoral irregularities came to light.

Many voters found themselves registered twice OI not at all.

In some poll stations 'yes' voters got a congratulatory certificate. • All this and the high rate of abstention have both severely discredited what was planned to be a triumphant entry into the fold of "democracy"

Armed police

Instead it ended up as more like a reminder of Franco's rule-the electoral irregularities, the virtual declaration of the result before a vote had been cast, the ban on demonstrations during the campaign and the omnipresent armed police at every polling station and on virtually every street corner.

Suarez and his reformist and Stalinist backers will try to cover up or argue away all these obvious symptoms of the absence of any real democracy.

But, not even by blaming intimidation by the Basque nationalists of the ETA, can they wipe from the record the sorry fate of the constitutional referendum in the Basque provinces (Euskadi).

In spite of a massive police presence and a huge government together with Stalinists (in which both voted. Felipe Gonzalez and Santiago Carrillo toured the region) the people of Euskadi contemptuously boycotted the constitution as a protest against its failure to recognise Basque.

In the Basque In Guipuzcoa -traditionally militant Basque the abstention 1 high as 47% of tl to vote. provinces, electorate and Biscay the most provincesote was as ose eligible Far from neutralising the continued sources of political instability in Spain, the referendum has sharpened . the conflict between the Madrid regime and the masses in Euskadi, and has done little if anything for the democratic credentials of the regime nationally.

Contradiction

Far from establishing a definitive parliamentary democratic order, the referendum may well turn out to have sharpened the contradictions.

These have expressed themselves in recent weeks on the one hand in ETA's effective campaign of terror against the armed police and civil guard, and on the other hand in last month's attempt at a military coup and increasing mobilisations by the far right.

At the end of it all the Interior Minister Martin Villa was reduced to saying weakly that the referendum was not so important any way, since the Spanish people had already definitively chosen what he calls "democracy" iri last year's elections!

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