Landslide to the Right

Idealists to their hot Spanish core, the revolutionists who sent King Alfonso XIII flying for his life could do no less than give Spanish women the right to vote. Last week they wished they had given them almost anything else. Too late Don Manuel Azana, a fiery feminist during his 20 dictatorial months as Premier of a Socialist Coalition government, remembered the words of the smart British-blooded spinster he made Minister of Prisons, Senorita Victoria Kent: "Spanish women are not prepared for the ballot yet."

In their own estimation Spanish women were more than prepared to vote in a parliamentary election last week for the first time in their lives. By the millions they were up at dawn, swarming around Spanish polling places. Nuns especially turned out en masse to vote against the Socialists who have so cramped the revenues and agelong privileges in Spain of Mother Church. Amazingly, hundreds of wives of Spanish grandees and nobles who have been living fearfully abroad boldly returned, bringing their husbands in many cases, to vote as their consciences commanded. All over Spain the arrival of a priest to pop his ballot into a voting urn was the signal for fervent female demonstrations, shrill appeals to the Holy Virgin to see that the election came out right.

Aghast at what was happening, henchmen of ex-Premier Azana and other leaders who made Spain a Republic, began to do their bit by bursting into polling places and smashing voting urns amid a welter of trampled ballots. Even the anti-Socialist but definitely Republican party of Premier Don Diego Martinez Barrios grew nervous as it began to seem that the women's vote might give victory to extreme Right parties loyal to "His Most Catholic Majesty." As tension grew the Mayor of Badajos was stabbed to death by poll pug-uglies, but not until he had fired his pistol several times, accidentally wounding a woman and child. In Madrid a pack of Socialists shouting "Kill the traitor!" chased for blocks a man who had cried "Long live the King!" He finally escaped into the Ministry of Public Works where he was arrested. At Gallarta one heroic priest, though shot in the abdomen by a Socialist poll watcher, insisted on being carried to the voting urn to ballot before being rushed to a hospital by his parishioners.

Worried, but far from beaten, Premier Barrios, an old school political boss who knows the technique of "making an election," presently announced that in more than 30 districts no candidate had won the 40% of the vote necessary for election last week. New elections must therefore be held in those provinces, with every prospect that the Socialists and Republicans will sink their differences and unite to oppose a landslide which threatened the very existence of the Spanish Republic.

On the face of incomplete returns, the hero of the landslide was easily pious, astute, evasive Jose Maria Gil Robles who calls his party the "National Movement." That it will move to the Right, possibly even so far as to attempt to restore the throne, no Spanish man or woman doubts, but Leader Robles has been too smart to define exactly what sort of an Old Deal he would give Spain. His enemies charge that he made a secret visit to Germany last fall "to study Nazi tactics and see if they could be applied in Spain."

Exuberant but cautious last week Old Dealer Robles cried, "I believe that parties of our group have already won at least 180 votes out of the 473 in the new Cortes. The enormous triumph of our candidates exceeds even our expectations."

Results in Catalonia were closer but equally exciting. Despite Barcelona's passion for autonomy, results at week's end seemed definitely to prove that the conservative Luga Catalana was nosing out snaggle-toothed "President" Francisco Macia's leftish Esquerra. Tarragona and Lerida to the south went definitely Conservative. Cried the wild-eyed Macia: "The election throughout Spain is dangerous. The Right is hostile to an autonomous regime and we must know how to defend ourselves!"

Piquant was the triumph of Spain's No. 1 jailbird and reputedly richest man, Tobacco Tycoon Juan March who bribed his way out of prison three weeks ago (TIME, Nov. 13) and escaped to France. The Island of Mallorca, where votes are particularly cheap, elected Jailbird and Fugitive March to the Cortes. In election speeches made for the absent candidate in Mallorca his henchmen said truthfully that "He was a great friend of King Alfonso."

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