SPAIN: VOTERS SAY 'S

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Even intellectuals confessed that they found the exercise of their franchise exhilarating. "I've seen so many elections in other countries that you would think it would not be new for me," said Magazine Editor Jose Luis Gutierrez. "But it was still hard to believe that I was actually voting myself." Added a television executive: "When the monitor said vota, I don't know, I felt an almost sexual emotion. Forty years, forty years..."

In the working-class suburb of Vallecas, so leftist that even in Franco days it was known as "Little Russia," a factory worker talked proudly of his Socialist vote—though he allowed that Suárez was simpático. "I am 34 and these elections are good for me, but mainly they are good for my children," he said. "We don't want to think about the civil war. That was a crime. Brother against brother. No one wants it again. No one."

But the war's memories were sometimes hard to still. In Paracuellos de Jarama, a small pueblo on the outskirts of Madrid that gained infamy during the civil war when Republican forces shot hundreds of Nationalist prisoners there, the local voting monitor politely ushered a trooper of the still feared Civil Guard out of the schoolroom polling station. "He has a gun, and he does not belong here," said one of the party observers behind the urn.

Such incidents, in their own ways, were small triumphs over old, ingrained fears. Even after the referendum last December, in which an overwhelming 90% of those voting endorsed the reform program that led to the election, many Spaniards doubted that it would take place. Recalled Writer Ernesto Carratala, 23: "Three or four months ago, many people thought June 15 would never happen, something would prevent it. They first had to see the election campaign to understand that the left was serious. And only that generated an opening up in the public."

As the campaign continued, skepticism declined. "Suddenly you got the feeling, particularly toward the end, of political life," said a journalist in Madrid. "The result was that even if some were bewildered, many more were interested. So much was crammed down so quickly. Everyone remembered how it was [before Franco died], and there you had the Communist flag in living color on television, and there was politics in the streets. It was like one of those old comic movies running at too fast a speed."

Four decades just could not be swept away overnight. When the first Communist campaign caravan rolled through Ciudad Real, old women crossed themselves. "As far as they were concerned, we were people with horns on our heads and bombs under each arm," said a party worker. "That's all they had ever known." While leftist parties did open some offices in villages, they made few converts. In one pueblo, a leftist coalition called a rally and found exactly two people in attendance. "Comrades," began one of the speakers, whereupon the two men stepped forward and identified themselves as Civil Guards. "You don't have to do it for us," said one of the cops.