[A voter burst into tears in a Madrid…]

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A voter burst into tears in a Madrid polling station last Wednesday when told that she could not vote for Franco.

She cried. too soon; because the "results" of the Suarez elections on June 15 were almost precisely what they were always intended to be-a victory for Francoism.

After what virtually every spokesman of the world capitalist class has labelled "Spain's first free elections for 41 years" , it is virtually certain that the "reformed" Francoist Union of the Democratic Centre (the electoral alliance led by Suarez which has 168 out of 350 seats in the new Congress and about 106 of the 207 elected seats in the Senate) will form a government alone.

. And every minister in it is likely to be either an ex-Minister of Franco or an ex-loyal servant of Franco in some lesser post.

Could it be that the Spanish masses have freely elected a "reformed" version of the dictatorship which has oppressed them for the last 40 years?

For numerous reasons the answer is emphatically no.

For one thing, the Spanish elections were very far from free, even in the very limited sense in which any bourgeois elections can be free.

The designation of the constituencies gave significantly less representation to provinces with large working class populations than to others.

Barcelona, for instance, where workers' and bourgeois Catalan nationalist parties could not be prevented from getting a huge majority of the seats, sends one representative to parliament for every 87,000 voters.

But backward rural Avila, where Suarez took all the seats needs only 43,000 voters to elect one member.

The ruling class had forgotten nothing of the two forms of fraud through which it rigged all elections before Franco's dictatorship.

One of these is called caciquismo (undue pressure by landowners, capitalists and priests on their tenants, workers and congregation).

Even Spain's cauțious bourgeois press, still liable to arbitrary state censorship, revealed numerous examples of this during the campaign, including inevitably priests who proclaimed voting Communist to be a "mortal sin".

GUNS AND CLUBS

And the supporters of Manuel Fraga's unashamedly Francoist Popular Alliance (which got 16 seats in the Congress) made a habit of doing their "campaigning" armed with guns and clubs:

The second traditional form of fraud is known as pucherazo, or stuffing the ballot boxes.

This practice was particularly easy in this election since the voting procedure for the Congress involved simply putting one of the party lists, unmarked into the ballot box.

In areas where the workers' parties were not able to keep observers in all the polling stations (of which there wère 38,000 in the whole country nothing was easier than to add or substitute the lists in the interests of the Francoist and other bourgeois parties.

In addition, the lists of the workers. parties often "disappeared" from polling stations. In Madrid alone on polling day there were 10,000 complaints to the electoral authorities (mostly state-appointed magistrates and other officials) about irregularities of this kind.

ABSTENTIONS

In many places numerous names had disappeared from the voters' lists and this especially seemed to have happened to those who had abstained in the referendum of December 15.

Since it was the left, and even half-heartedly the Communist and Socialist Parties, which had called for abstention then, this form of "eliminating" voters was almost certain to benefit the Francoists.

A Communist Party spokesman estimated that 200,000 potential voters had been disfranchised in this wav in Rarrelana alone ist parties and those of the parties to their left, including the electoral alliance supported by the Revolutionary Communist League, (LCR), Spanish sympathising section of the 'United' Secretariat of the Fourth International. The second part of this article will also assess the campaign for the boycott of the election. stration of disfranchised citizens took place outside one. polling station. The state-controlled and totally censored television, needless to say, reported not a single word on. these ubiquitous forms of electoral fraud.

Instead it spewed out an endless series of vacuous self-congratulatory "reports" from the provinces, the BBC, Edward Heath and others explaining how the elections had passed without incident and were everywhere "clean and authentically democratic."

CP leader Carrillo voting PSOE leader Gonzalez During 12 hours of concentrated TV propaganda about the 'fairness' of the elections, however, no results came.

Only continuous statements that the votes counted so far were not sufficient to make an assessment. In fact it was evidently a tense and nervous Interior Minister Martin Villa who finally-12 hours after the time originally announcedhanuaht the news to the waitina Disfranchised voters protest Democratic Centre had "won"

lhe pretext he gave. IoI the delay was the "complicated" counting system, though there is no doubt that the real problem was fending off the complaints and making sure that the "recounts" produced the right results.

Because of their nature, there was never a serious possiblity that these elections could have produced a majority for the workers' parties.

And the reformists and Stalinists went into them in the full knowledge that that was true and as part an effort to head off the demands of a growing number of workers for a decisive and therefore revolutionary overthrow of Francoism.

APPEARANCE

But this joint counter-revolutionary strategy of the Francoists and the reformists and Stalinists forced the former to give the elections a clear appearance of democracy and to permit a transformation of the surface of Spanish political life.

There was an extraordinary proliferation of TV and radio broadcasts by the political candidacies (even those supported by illegal parties).

The blank walls of Franco's Spain were plastered with posters which, as long as they did not call for a boycott, the police permitted to be pasted up anywhere.

Teams of fly-posters (militants oi the workers" parties OI unemployed young people paid up to £25 a day by the bourgeois parties) were everywhere.

POSTERS

The walls of Madrid's underground stations were in places plastered ten posters thick with election propaganda. And the streets were inches deep in leaflets or after heavy rain in a thick mulch of unreadable propaganda.

In the big cities cars constantly toured the streets asking for votes or, in the case of the workers' parties, playing the Internationale.

The most striking and important feature of the campaign was the meetings. The Democratic Centre held very few and most of those of the Popular Alliance (AP) took place discreetly in cinemas with entry rigorously controlled by AP thugs.

But the workers' parties held vast rallies in the open air or in sports stadiums or bull-rings.

An attendance of 3,000 at these was a minimum for tha laura sitinstudents showed by their behaviour that they were not expecting their problems to be solved by elections.

And frequently they shouted their own solutions which were much more uncompromising than those being presented from the platform.

More than that, the reformist and Stalinist leaders have by no means had complete success in their efforts to impose an electoral truce on the working class.

In the provinces of Euskadi in particular, the period of the election campaign has been one of increasing wage struggle.

It began on June 2 when virtually all the 33,000 construction workers in the province of Viscaya (which includes Bilbao) defied the reformists and Stalinists who would like to become their leaders and went on strike for big increases in pay and a long series of other demands which the bosses had contemptously dismissed as impossible.

The construction workers were followed by scaffolding erectors and then last week by bakery workers.

JOINT MEETING

The day after the election results all three groups took the unprecedented step of holding a joint assembly and demonstration.

A week before the election the workers in Alava province also came out on strike.

1wo days before polling day, 22 of them were arrested and six detained in custody.

An almost instantaneous demonoutside the station of 3,000 building, Justice» workers forced the fearful authorities to release them immediately. Not one word of this appeared in the capitalist press.

It is nevertheless now a much weakened Francoism which rules Spain. The limited liberties of propaganda and assembly granted for the campaign will not be easy to withdraw.

The once tightly integrated sectors of Francoism, the army and police, the church hierarchy and the political leadership| have become unhinged from eachother.

It is the struggle of the working class and the oppressed nationalities which has obliged the Francoist political leaders to attempt to legitimise their rule through constructing an appearance of democracy.

Only in that way have they up to now managed, with the help of the reformist and Stalinist leaders, to avert an openly revolutionary struggle for power by the working class and at the same time to hold back those sectors of Francoism who see the only way out for the bourgeoisie as the reimposition oi the dictatorship through a military coup.

The elections may produce brief respite for Suarez but they have not in any way resolved these contradictions.

There is no doubt that the acceptance of the result by the hardline Francoists is a conditional acceptance. After the elections the task facing the Spanish workers movement is in essence the same as it was before-the forcible overthrow of Francoism.

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SECOND IN OUR SERIES 'HOW FASCISTS TOOK 9221 STATE POWER, BY JIM SHORT.