SPAIN: A Suitable Kind of King

Aware that millions of Spaniards, though mindful of his extraordinarily good run of health, may be worried over who succeeds him, Dictator Francisco Franco, 64, has agreed that he will permit the restoration of the Spanish monarchy at some unspecified future date. In 1954 he reached a secret understanding with Don Juan, the Pretender to the Spanish throne, who lives in exile in Portugal, for his son Prince Juan Carlos to attend the military academy in Spain. Last week Franco gave Spaniards a sketch of the kind of monarchy he is planning for Spain.

"It will not be an absolute monarchy, serving the privileges of a minority," said

Presidential Minister Luis Carrero Blanco. "Nor will it be a liberal monarchy, which is no more than a crowned republic. It will be the traditional monarchy of Spain, adapted to the circumstances of modern times, the traditional monarchy in its epoch of grandeur, that of Isabella and Ferdinand,* the Yoke and the Arrows of the Falange."

Rear Admiral Carrero (a weekend Navy man who got his admiral's rank only this spring) went on to describe Franco as "one of those gifts that Providence grants a nation every three or four centuries," a man "fundamentally antiliberal, anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist." "The person" Franco would choose to "sit in his time on the throne." continued the admiral, would be a man "perfectly identified with" and "absolutely loyal to" the Falange movement. This suggested, just as many Spanish monarchists have long uneasily suspected, that Franco intends to crown not the No. 1 heir Don Juan, but his young son Prince Juan Carlos. Compared with the British-educated, still young (44) Don Juan, who might be impregnated with liberal ideas about government, 19-year-old Juan Carlos would presumably be easier to handle.

In Lausanne, Switzerland, where the Pretender and his son are vacationing. Don Juan snapped: "When the monarchy is restored, the succession will naturally be mine. There will never be any question of my stepping aside in favor of my son.'' Said Prince Juan Carlos: "As far as I am concerned, my father is the King."