PASCUAL MARAGALL I RUBERT de VENTOS
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he is also said to have told Nicolas Franco that the only thing the Communists
expect from Juan Carlos is that he'll quit.)
To the left of the
C.
P. are the Maoists and Trotskyists. Since' 68, they've
been strong in the universities and even high schools, and among the illegal
teachers' unions; they also have a constituency among the working class, in
the factory and the neighborhood. Bur on the whole, after a period of
anti-liberal " leftism ," the Maoist and Trotskyist groups joined democratic
coalitions with the
C.
P., the socialists, and Christian Democrats. A case in
point is the Assembly of Catalonia, a huge illegal body embracing all the
parties and also Catalan autonomists. Perhaps the broadest based of the
political groups in the country, it 's been around for years, meets and is trailed
by the political police every once in a while.
From the Assembly could come a provisional government for Catalonia.
But the c.P. and its right-wing allies in the Junta Democratica might bypass
the Catalan Assembly in order to make a quick deal. Evolutionists ,
particularly if they're army men, or have held government jobs, are likely to
be uncomfortable with the prospect of a truly popular state. As the
Democratic Junta 's manifesto proclaimed: "The non-continuity of the
Regime is required for the continuity of the state."
*
*
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Evol utionists are also not likely to recognize that the question of national
minorities is a live
ow',
for one of the principles that has unified the upper
class and the bourgeois elite around Franco is his insistence on "the unity of
Spain's lands and peoples" -a direct reference both to the necessity that
those classes (including the Basque and Catalan industrialists and bankers)
felt for a unified, protected national market, and to the centralist feelings of
the Castilian rural and urban middle-class from which come many state and
army officials.
To the extent that the Civil War of 1936-39 protected the interests of
capital in general, much of the northern business world in Catalonia and
Euzkadi supported Franco at the price of their national pride and their interest
in free enterprise. Today, however, the northern middle class is no longer
willing to swallow Castilian centralism , and the northern rich see that the
Francoist Regime is not able to get them into the Common Market.
Understanding that the slogan of Spain's unity appears to them a mere cover
for continuing an inept, dictatorial Regime that is unable to cope with
domestic diversity and foreign challenge makes it easier to understand the
Catalan Assem bly , and, more important , the wide support for the nationalist
movement ETA (Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna, or "Basque Country and free-
