CONFLICTING FORCES

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 77, 24 January 1947, Page 6

CONFLICTING FORCES

THE SPANISH PROBLEM

DON JUAN MAY GAIN THRONE

Have the Spanish monarchists “missed the bus.” Was there ever a bus to catch? Has Don Juan lost his chance of becoming King of Spain? Did he ever have a chance? asks a British correspondent in Portugal. For many months he has been living in this artificial but agreeable seaside villa-colony with his wife and children and he appears to be no nearer, politically, to Madrid than he was during the years he lived in Lausanne following his designation by Alfonso XIII., his father, as the heir to the Spanish throne.

With General Franco’s power unshaken after repeated condemnation by the states which refuse to forget that Hitler and Mussolini helped hjm overthrow the republic, and with the republicans at home" and in exile as determined as ever to re-establish the republic, what chances has Don Juan of sitting again on the throne of his father, abandoned by him in 1931 because Spain refused to be ruled by him any longer? In face of the conflicting forces struggling over Spain, there is some reason to think that Don Juan has more chances than might appear to Part of “Spanish Question”

The conflict, in fact, has given him his opportunity. Don Juan is part of the “Spanish question” now before the Assembly of the United Nations, even though unmentioned. Everything affecting Spain is inevitably part of the problem presented by what the government-controlled newspapers in Spain call the “socalled Spanish question,” There is, of course, nothing “so called” about the Spanish question. It has been one of the most troubling questions for the ten years since all the European countries set up a committee to prevent intervention in Spain—at a time when Germany and Italy were actively intervening on one side and, to some extent, France and the Soviets on the other.

Spain sees the Spanish question, naturally, from its own angle, which is that of the former victim of all this attention.

Today, instead of the old light over Spain, there is a new one before the Assembly of the United Nations, between a group of demo-cratically-minded nations on one side and a Communist-minded group on the other. ' From the Spanish point of view there is a certain similarity between the situation today and that of ten years ago. Change in Circumstances

Neither Don Juan nor his father, the former King Alfonso XIII, had any part in all this ten years and

more of trouble. But the Spanish dynasty was in power not so very long ago, near enough in time so that all grown Spaniards remember those “good old times.” With the constantly recurring Spanish question they recall that in the days of the monarchy they lived at home in their own house and, however badly the country may at times have been governed, it was all in the hands of Spaniards, without any interference from outside. Spain was their house into which no outsider dared intrude. So far all Don Juan has done of a public nature is to let his programme be known, but he has not even done that formally. But it is generally believed that he wants to be a constitutional monarch, with the powers of the monarch limited by the constitution and the affairs of the country run by the nationally elected Cortes. Don Juan is a large, patient man, but with a shrewd eye and an easygoing manner. He gives the impression of knowing how to wait.