(3 of 3)
Indeed, after 25 years, the question of succession is still unanswered. Although Franco in 1947 declared Spain a kingdom, there is no real indication that it will ever have a king—even though the official pretender, the dynamic Don Juan de Bourbon, is often boomed as Franco's logical successor. In fact, Franco has not taken one step to guarantee a normal change of power. "We are like a bottle of champagne," says a Madrid shopkeeper. "If the cork is not held down tightly, it shoots up to the ceiling."
Franco is often criticized because he is a dictator, and to the West's liberals and social democrats he is still the bloodspattered villain of a thousand torture chambers and political executions. The description no longer fits. In the period following the civil war, Spain unquestionably needed a strong hand. Had Franco used his victory well, applied his mandate wisely, he might well have gone down in history as the man who saved
Spain from itself. Unfortunately, unless he does live to be 80 and devotes the next decade to boldly granting freedom and building the broadly based institutions on which rests true stability, Franco may be recorded only as the man who held down the cork.
*Some 1936 contemporaries: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt, Ataturk, Leon Blum, Stanley Baldwin, Eduard Benes; all are dead.