TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0381> <link 93HT0502> <link 89TT3314> <link 89TT2439> <title> 1970s: Europe </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Europe: 1970s </hdr> <body> [In the 1970s democracy in Europe took a giant step forward. Greece, which had been under the sway of a repressive military dictatorship since 1967, was restored to democracy in 1974. In Portugal in the same year, however, it was the military that led the revolution against a fascist dictatorship.] (May 6, 1974) All told, it took only 14 hours to smash the dictatorship established by Salazar 45 years ago and set the 8 million people of Portugal on what the army promised would be a new, democratic course. But it was not a quest for freedom that had motivated the rebels as much as the desire to stop the bloody and costly guerrilla war in the African colonies. The war consumed more than 40% of the nation's $1.3 billion annual budget, claimed the lives of some 250 Portuguese troops every year, and caused profound frustration in the army, which felt that it was trapped in an unwinnable battle. Disenchantment with the Caetano government's colonial policy climaxed in February when General Antonio de Spinola added his prestigious name to those of the dissenters with his book against the war. Young officers enthusiastically echoed Spinola's criticisms and even attempted an ineffectual coup that was smashed within hours. They were better prepared this time. Lisbon reacted like a liberated city. People joked with the soldiers guarding the main streets and squares, and long stemmed red carnations, a symbol of support for the army, appeared everywhere. Cheers and hurrahs greeted every mention of Spinola's name. Appointed to the seven-man ruling junta group that he clearly dominated, Spinola went on television with his colleagues to promise free elections "as soon as possible," a phrase later defined as some time within the next year. They also pledged to abolish the hated secret police in Portugal itself and grant full civil liberties. Censorship was lifted, and the Lisbon newspaper Republica placed a red box on its front page to announce the first uncensored edition anyone could recall. [Portugal fell into the grip of leftist officers, and for a while it was touch and go whether democracy would triumph.] (May 5, 1975) One year to the day after the "revolution of flowers" that ended a half-century of oppressive dictatorship, the Portuguese people went to the polls last week to vote for a new constituent assembly. It was the country's first free election in three generations, and for an electorate so long disenfranchised, the voters spoke with a remarkably clear voice. Parties representing moderate positions in Portugal's left-hued political spectrum received nearly 70% of the ballots; the Communists, their allies and a slew of tiny radical parties received less than 20% of the vote. In ordinary circumstances, such an outcome would serve to ally fears that the ruling Armed Forces Movement (M.F.A.) was easing Portugal toward Communism. But these are not ordinary times in Lisbon, and the M.F.A. had made sure in advance that last week's voting would be little more than an opinion poll and an exercise in "political education" for a populace that they do not consider ready for full democracy. Real power will remain with the 28-member Revolutionary Council, composed of President Franciso da Costa Gomes, Premier Goncalves and other officers whose exact political makeup is not known, but who lean heavily to the left. (December 8, 1975) For months, left and center in Portugal had been warily eying one another, waiting for some kind of decisive showdown. Last week the long-awaited confrontation took place, when far-leftist air-force units--primarily paratroopers--attempted to take control by seizing military bases. In a remarkable show of strength and will, the moderates quickly struck back. With the support of loyalist troops--notably Colonel Jaime Neves' 900 commandos ("the animals," as the rest of the military calls them)--Premier Jose Pinheiro de Azevedo's regime routed the radicals, and moderate forces gained command. "The far left is finished," said one top military official. Added an elated diplomat in Lisbon: "I am going to send off a cable now saying that the good guys won." [Democracy's finest hour in the 1970s came in Spain, which had stifled under the fascist Franco regime ever since the defeat of the Republic in 1939. After Franco's death in 1975, an enlightened monarchy presided over a return to exuberant, responsible political life.] (June 27, 1977) It was Spain's first free election in 41 years, and the results were a cautious endorsement of the astute young politician who was appointed by King Juan Carlos eleven months ago to guide the transition to democracy. Rejecting parties on both the far left and far right, the voters swept Premier Adolfo Suarez Gonzalez, 44, and his Democratic Center Union (U.C.D.), a center-right coalition of 15 parties, to within seven seats of an absolute majority in the lower house of the new Cortes. No one under 64 in Spain had ever voted before in an election. Yet the people, somewhat to their own surprise, went to the polls as if they had been doing it all their lives. "It is so normal," said one young woman activist of the socialist Workers Party, "that it makes you think we have been living in a democracy for the last 40 years." [Spain's democracy included the Communist Party under Santiago Carillo, a new breed of Marxists who vowed to accept the discipline of the ballot box and declared their independence from Moscow. The Eurocommunists, as they were called,were greeted with alarm by the U.S., which feared the undermining of NATO. Even the French Communists, who were previously known as Moscow's most sycophantic apologists in Western Europe, had a fling with Eurocommunism.] (February 16, 1977) In the "Red Belt" Paris suburb of St. Ouen, 1,600 French Communists filed into an oyster-shaped sports arena for their 22nd Party Congress. A sign inside the hall proclaimed: A DEMOCRATIC ROAD TO SOCIALISM--A SOCIALISM FOR FRANCE. Party Leader Georges Marchais amplified that soothing slogan in a five-hour opening address that amounted to a cautious declaration of independence from Moscow. Marchais did pay some of the traditional tributes to Soviet Communism, lauding its social accomplishments and democratic structures, even pledging to fight "anti-Sovietism." But he also underscored French Communism's new autonomy by attacking "repressive measures" taken by the Soviet Union against dissidents in extraordinarily blunt language. Said he: "We cannot agree to the Communist ideal being stained by unjust and unjustifiable acts. Such acts are in no way a necessary consequence of socialism." Disavowing the central Marxist doctrine of a dictatorship of the proletariat as out of date, Marchais argued instead that his party's call was to unite the working class with the salaried middle class, and scorned collectivism as a "barracks Communism that casts everyone and everything in the same mold." The French party, he insisted, does not want "uniformity that stifles, but diversity that enriches." Marchais's unorthodox party policy statement was particularly notable in light of the French party's half-century record of slavishly backing Moscow. (March 27, 1978) Not since 1968, when millions of students and workers erupted in a violent spasm of protest that brought France to a virtual standstill, had the fifth Republic wavered so precariously on a political pinpoint. Challenging the center-right government of President Valery Giscard d'Estaing was the combined appeal of an alliance of Socialists and Communists. All the nation's polling organizations had predicted that the leftists would come out on top in the first of two Sunday rounds of parliamentary elections. But in the first round and again in last weekend's runoff, the voters of France trooped to the polls to give Giscard's government an unexpected endorsement. The leftist upset was a stunning personal defeat for Socialist Leader Francois Mitterrand, and arrested the steady rise of the Socialist Party. Most important, it prevented France's highly disciplined, authoritarian Communist Party from gaining a stranglehold on the government. [It was in Italy that the Eurocommunists enjoyed their greatest success. But there, as elsewhere, the movement's appeal was short-lived.] (January 5, 1976) Long considered the most moderate Communist party in Western Europe, the P.C.I. is acting as if it were already part of the government. As a result of their stunning triumphs in regional elections last summer, leftist administrations now control every major Italian city except Rome and Palermo. At the national level, although theoretically the largest opposition party, the Communists tacitly support the Christian Democratic government of Premier Aldo Moro. In fact, Moro's weak coalition Cabinet faces a bedeviling paradox: the Socialists, who are supposed to support the government, are increasingly at odds with it, while the opposition Communists help to keep the coalition on its feet. With only a touch of exaggeration, one Communist official boasts: "At this point, I would say we are the government's only support." (March 20, 1978) In the Green Room of Rome's Chigi Palace, the leaders of five of the most prestigious parties in Italian politics last week added a significant red tint to Europe's most troubled government. It was not the "historic compromise" that would bring Communists to power in Italy, but it was the next, most important step. After 52 days of do-nothing disagreement, Christian Democratic Premier-designate Giulio Andreotti and Communist Party Chief Enrico Berlinguer accepted a "governing agreement that puts Communists directly in the majority for the first time since 1947, when they were expelled from the postwar Cabinet of Alcide de Gasperi. Under the agreement, which the smaller Socialist, Social Democratic and Republican parties also ratified, the Communists will henceforth have a direct role in government--not with Cabinet portfolios, but as full, acknowledged partners in Andreotti's parliamentary majority. As Berlinguer put it jubilantly, Italy's big (1.7 million members) Communist Party has reached "the threshold of national leadership responsibility." (June 18, 1979) As Party Boss Enrico Berlinguer stepped dejectedly out onto the balcony, there was only a desultory round of applause. His message could not have been less triumphant: Berlinguer acknowledged what he called an "appreciable variation with respect to our exceptional advances of 1976." When someone dutifully unfurled the red hammer-and-sickle flag from the balcony, a disgusted voice piped up loudly from the crowd: "Leave it at half-mast!" "Appreciable variation" soon became the established party-line euphemism for what was actually a stunning political defeat: the loss of more than a million votes in Italy's national election last week. The setback was a dramatic reversal of the P.C.I.'s successive gains in the regional vote of 1975 and the general election of 1976, which had provoked anxiety in every Western capital about the specter of Eurocommunism coming to power in the NATO alliance. The defeat also raised the prospect of an intraparty challenge to Berlinguer's leadership, since it appeared to be a repudiation of his gradualist "historic compromise" strategy of joining the government in a national alliance with the centrist parties. Said Flaminio Piccoli, president of the Christian Democrats: "The Communist Party has lost its referendum on entering the government." [In Great Britain, there was a political breakthrough of another sort.] (May 14, 1979) Savor the moment. For the first time in history, two women were the principals in the traditional "kissing hands upon appointment"--a ceremony in which the leader of the winning party is summoned to Buckingham Palace, there to be designated Prime Minister of Britain by the monarch and asked to form a government. The monarch, of course, was Queen Elizabeth II. The Prime Minister was Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 53, a grocer's daughter from the English Midlands, who last week led her Conservation Party to a decisive victory over James Callaghan's Labor Party. The Tories won a solid majority of 43 sets in the 635-member House of Commons, and Thatcher thereby became not only the first woman to head a British government but the first to lead a major Western nation. </body> </article> </text>