Galicia’s election. A farewell to Fraga

A Franco-era veteran who is on the brink of retirement

AFTER last weekend's Galician election, Manuel Fraga, a former minister of Franco's, called on St James, patron saint of Spain, to deliver him a last victory. Mr Fraga's centre-right People's Party (PP), which he founded after Franco's death in 1975, won 37 seats. But he needs one more to win a majority in the Galician assembly. The final result will not be known until some 70,000 votes of Galicians living abroad, mainly in Argentina and Uruguay, are counted next week.

If Mr Fraga, who is 82, wins a fifth successive majority, it will be a tribute to the idiosyncrasies of the conservative bastion that is Galicia, birthplace of both Franco and the present PP leader, Mariano Rajoy. It will also provide a big boost for the PP, still struggling after its loss of the general election in March 2004. Don Manuel, as Mr Fraga is known, wants to fulfil his wish to die, as Franco did, with his boots on. Yet his opponents seem more likely to win: they claim that the PP needs a whopping two-thirds of the emigre vote. The Socialists and the Galician Nationalists hope to form a coalition government, depriving Spanish politics of an historic figure who played a key role in the country's transition from dictatorship to democracy.

The Spanish left likes to portray Mr Fraga as an embarrassing anachronism. He obliges by making many absurd statements. During the campaign he told the opposition party “to eat shit” and warned voters that, when the Socialist government told them it was raining, “they are pissing on us.” He suggested that asking voters whom they would vote for was like asking women how many men they had slept with - they never give an accurate reply. And he caused outrage by saying that gays were “unnatural”.

His reputation for running Galicia with the stultifying control of an ageing despot was enhanced by a habit of falling asleep in meetings. He collapsed earlier this year during a live television broadcast. He faces criticism inside the PP for not stepping down sooner. “I know my people,” he said in an interview. “They are prudent people.” He grows irascible when asked about the Franco years. “No, I have no regrets. I did not serve during the civil war. I served in the last years of Franco.”

Mr Fraga rejects attempts to cast him in the role of villainous Francoist. He was born in Villalba in 1922, but moved aged three to Cuba as part of the flow of 2m Galicians who emigrated in the 20th century. He is a prodigious writer with an encyclopaedic memory and quixotic tendencies. In the Franco years he was a moderately progressive education minister. Later, as information minister, he relaxed censorship of the press and publishing, opening the door to democratic change - the popular refrain at the time was “with Fraga, down to the knickers”. He is, in short, credited with civilising the Spanish right.

His unorthodox ways set him apart from his peers. He recently upset PP leaders in Madrid when he rebutted their vow never to negotiate with ETA, the Basque terrorists, by revealing that he had done just that soon after Franco's death. But a new generation of voters which grew up after Mr Fraga's improvements to Galicia's infrastructure is less enthusiastic about his style of leadership. He was criticised over the Prestige oil spill in 2002, which devastated the local fishing industry. When it happened, he was in Castile on a hunting trip and did not hurry back.

The Socialist government in Madrid has recently needled the PP by pulling down statues of Franco. It seems that the Galician electorate may be about to consign Don Manuel to the past as well.