Spain: Monarchy Si, Liberal No

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The newspaper A.B.C. is an institution in Spain. Usually dull, always conservative, it is nevertheless the most widely read and influential paper in Madrid. Besides, as the semi-official organ of the nation's organized monarch ists, it can justly claim to represent the government's position that Franco will one day be succeeded by a King. Yet early one morning last week, security cops moved in on newsstands to confiscate all copies of the paper they could find, readers. It even was the grabbed first it time from that A.B.C. sidewalk had been banned since the fall of the Spanish Republic. It was also the first time that the government had used its new liberalized press law against any Spanish newspaper.

The four-month-old law supposedly ended 30 years of Franco censorship. There were one or two stern provisions in it, however, the foremost of which was that the government could confiscate anything it does not like and prosecute the author. And although the regime had not felt the need to use its powers against the generally tame daily press before, fortnight ago it banned a book edited by José Maria Gil Robles, a Catholic politician, which said that Franco should be followed by a liberal regime, preferably a monarchy.

It was an editorial extolling the virtues of the liberal monarchies of Great Britain, Belgium and The Netherlands that landed A.B.C. in the soup. Instead of following the official attitude that a post-Franco "institutions" of the monarch must Franco regime, maintain the the paper praised Don Juan de Borbón y Battenberg, chief pretender to the throne, for promoting "a European monarchy, a democratic monarchy, a popular monarchy, a monarchy for all." Such thoughts are apparently still heresy in Franco's liberalized Spain.