Moncloa Pact

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The Moncloa Pact (Spanish: Pactos de la Moncloa) was a one-year treaty signed on October 25, 1977 between the government of Spain - in the person of the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Spain Adolfo Suárez - and the most important party leaders in the House of Representatives . The agreement was supported by the business association CEOE and several unions (CCOO and UGT). The House of Commons ratified the treaty on October 27, 1977 , and later also the House of Lords .

background

The Spanish industry had specialized economically in areas such as shipbuilding, iron and steel production and mining. There were also labor-intensive industries such as the textile and shoe industry. With the oil crisis of 1973 - the price of oil doubled - and rising wage costs, Spanish companies ran into financial difficulties and as a result unemployment rose in the second half of the 1970s. Average annual inflation exceeded the 10 percent mark for the first time in 1973, only to peak in 1977 at around 24 percent per year - a wage-price spiral had emerged. On June 15, 1977, the first parliamentary election after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco took place in Spain , in which the conservative-liberal electoral alliance Unión de Centro Democrático won and Adolfo Suárez became prime minister. One of his first economic policy decisions was on July 11, 1977 to devalue the Spanish currency, the peseta , by 20 percent against the US dollar. The economist and economics minister Enrique Fuentes Quintana worked out a reform package called “Programa de Saneamiento y Reforma Económico”, which became the basis for discussion of the Moncloa Pact.

Contract negotiations

In Madrid, in the Moncloa Palace , the official seat of the Prime Minister, the negotiations took place between October 8 and 21, 1977. Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez and some of his ministers were involved on the government side. On the other side were representatives of various parties from parliament: Felipe González ( PSOE ), Joan Reventós i Carner and Josep Maria Triginer (both from left-wing Catalan parties), Miquel Roca ( a liberal regional party in Catalonia ), Manuel Fraga Iribarne ( Alianza Popular ) , Enrique Tierno Galván (Partido Socialista Popular), Juan de Ajuriaguerra ( Basque Nationalist Party ), Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo ( Union of the Democratic Center ) and Santiago Carrillo ( Communist Party of Spain ).

An important opponent of the treaty was the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the anarcho-syndicalist trade union in Spain , which was newly founded in 1976 under illegality (see also: Anarchism in Spain ). The CNT has been organizing its first major demonstrations since the beginning of 1977 and on July 2, 1977, it held a meeting in Barcelona with hundreds of thousands of people.

Content of the contract

The treaty comprised short-term and medium-term economic policy regulations, and it named common political convictions that should be put into law as soon as possible (the current constitution of the Kingdom of Spain came into force about a year later on December 29, 1978).

Economic regulations

In the economic policy part, the following were agreed:

  • Spending cuts to consolidate the state budget
  • A smaller increase in social spending for companies
  • The central bank is supposed to reduce inflation
  • Limiting the rise in prices and wages
  • The income tax , corporate tax and the tax reform
  • unemployment insurance is nationalized

Some of the stipulations affecting the unions were:

  • To this end, workers were guaranteed the right to organize, strike and negotiate.
  • Return of the historical property of the Spanish trade unions.
  • Return of the fund created by membership in the forced unions.

In order to accommodate the urbanization of the country, cities should be given arable land and housing should be encouraged.

In the educational part of the contract, the following were agreed:

  • the quantitative and qualitative expansion of the education system
  • the admission of regional languages ​​and cultures

Comprehensive reforms were agreed in the agricultural and fisheries policy and measures to save energy were agreed in response to the current energy crisis.

Political and legal principles

The principles stated in the contract addressed the following issues:

  • Freedom of the word should be realized
  • Radiotelevisión Española will be placed under democratic control
  • Freedom of assembly
  • The right to freely form political parties
  • The liberalization of criminal law is urgently needed for some problems (e.g. women's rights, military criminal law)
  • Law enforcement agencies

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ inflation.eu: Historic inflation Spain - CPI inflation
  2. ^ The Scala case 1978, January 14, 2010
  3. ↑ Dieter Eich, Spain: From dictatorship to handicapped democratization, page 26 (PDF; 94 kB)