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He also receives a steady parade of his subjects, who are driven by the busload from Spain.
But there is no guarantee that Don Juan will ever get the call. A believer in representative government, he has never approved of Franco, and for good reason refuses to live in Spain: he does not want to be under the shad ow of the Caudillo. As a result, he is cordially distrusted by many Franco stalwarts. Much more manageable, they feel, would be Don Juan's handsome son, Prince Juan Carlos, 27; Franco sent him through Spain's three military academies and gave him a Madrid palace after his wedding to Greek Princess Sophie. Trouble is, Juan Carlos will not cooperate. "I'll never, never accept the crown as long as my father is alive," he maintains, and there is every indication that he means it. In any case, he has proved unexciting in his few public appearances.
Warring Factions. Whoever, and whatever, comes after Franco will not have an easy time of it. Since the civil war, Franco has been the absolute authority in a land whose citizens are by nature anarchists. The keynote of his rule has been "paz social," but even the wily Caudillo has been hard-pressed at times to keep peace amid the warring factions that have made up his regime.
As the civil war has faded, the factions and their causes have changed, but the battles go on. There are now three political power spheres that are almost bound to collide in their rush to try to fill the post-Franco vacuum. Strangely enough, the Movimiento Nacional is not one of them. It has been reduced by Franco to a powerless bureaucracy, without credo and virtually without following, deprived even of the fascist ideals on which it was founded.
The first sphere is labor, organized now into state-controlled syndicates but under the shadow of the great anarchist and socialist unions of the Republic—which still operate underground, still hold the sympathies of many workers. The second sphere is the Christian Democratic Movement, a loose coalition of Catholic groups ranging from the conservative Accion Catolica, which supports the regime, to the left-leaning Catholic labor movements, which oppose it. (Members of Opus Dei can be found in all groups.) The third is the Monarchists, well organized but without mass popular support. And above them all is the army, leaning at the moment toward the monarchists but capable of stepping in at any moment with a pronunciamiento on the pretext of forestalling violence.
Division of Powers. There is a growing possibility that Franco himself may step in to smooth the transition. He is aware of the problems that his death will create, and, painful though it may be, finally seems to be doing something to try to lessen them. Three times in the past 18 months, his speeches have referred to the need to "institutionalize" the regime. With his approval, the first tentative drafts of a new "institutional law" were debated behind the closed doors of last year's final Cabinet meeting.
It is probably the most radical measure that the Cabinet has ever taken up, for it would hand over a good