Spain: Toward a Change

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patent leather hats, occasionally glimpsed rumbling down narrow highways or patrolling the ridges of the hills, still maintain Franco's police state. It is a regime that does not keep the nation in chains but covers it like a soggy blanket.

Since the harsh days of the Civil War, the jails have been emptied of many of their political prisoners, and there has been no death sentence for a political offense in ten years. Tertulias (cafe discussions) are universal and sometimes surprisingly frank.

El Caudillo himself has mellowed, but he has lost none of the crafty skill or un derlying steel. Every coin of the nation still bears his image and the words. "Chief of Spain by the Grace of God." Puritani cal and pious, he sometimes prays for hours in his private chapel in Pardo pal ace before making major decisions ; to in duce night-loving, late-eating Spaniards to follow his own early-to-bed habit, he has ordered Madrid restaurants and cafes to stop serving food after midnight.

Rumors of Franco's bad health have been current for years. Don Juan himself figures in one. Two years ago there were reports that Franco had passed out in his car, overcome by carbon monoxide fumes.

Soon afterward, during one of their rare meetings, the dialogue went like this : Don Juan (bluntly) : I hear you've been sick, lost your senses or something.

Franco (furiously) : No, no, not at all, just some digestive troubles.

Then, last winter, an exploding shot gun shattered Franco's hand as he hunted partridge in the sprawling palace grounds.

Some now say that Franco's injured hand may have to be amputated, but he does his best to squelch the story. Recently, he has made a special effort to show him self in public, waving the hand, grasping trophies, gripping rostrums as he delivers his speeches in the familiar piping voice.

Political Spectrum. Whatever the un rest that is disturbing the Franco regime, it has so far not benefited Spain's splintered political parties, which are hardly parties in the usual sense. They operate in a vacuum, with no means of reaching the Spanish people, and they suffer from that fierce individualism that turns any three Spaniards meeting on a street corner into a new political faction.

On the far right is Young Europe, a few hundred students who feel that Franco is actually too liberal, has abandoned fascism. Somewhere near this crowd are the moribund remnants of the Falange, the onetime fascist party that Franco used to gain power; Falangists today are opportunistic, scattered and weak. At the other extreme, on the far left, are outfits like the Popular Liberation Front, whose Marxist leader has been in jail since 1959. Roughly in the political center are: 1) the Christian Democrats, led by Jose Maria Gil Robles, 63, a prominent Madrid lawyer, and 2) the Liberals, whose spokesman has been Dionisio Ridruejo, a onetime Falangist who has been in the opposition for years.

Both leaders were in Munich fortnight ago to attend a conference of the European Movement, a group promoting a United States of Europe. The event turned into an exciting demonstration of Spanish opposition sentiment, rendered all the more interesting by the fact that Gil

Robles is a member of Don Juan's privy council.

Two Traditions. Along with Gil Robles and Ridruejo, 80 anti-Franco politicians of all