Spain’s Communist Party Ousts Longtime Chief From Key Body

MADRID â€”  Santiago Carrillo, often called the father of the Spanish Communist Party, has been expelled from its Central Committee for maintaining hard-line, pro-Soviet views and refusing to compromise with moderates.

In all, 19 people were purged from the 110-member Central Committee on Friday, in the party’s most serious schism ever. Among those ousted were the heads of party committees in Madrid, Valencia, Galicia and the Basque region.

Carrillo, a Communist leader for almost 50 years dating back to the Spanish Civil War, served as party secretary general from 1960 to 1982, when he resigned after the Communists received only 3.8% of the vote in national elections.

He became famous as a young leader of Spanish Republican opposition to Gen. Francisco Franco in the period from 1936 to 1939. During the later years of the dictator’s long regime, Carrillo headed the party from exile, returning after Franco died in 1975.

The Spanish Communists, now led by Secretary General Gerardo Iglesias, 39, voted two weeks ago to oust the 70-year-old Carrillo if he and his supporters did not accept a plan to unify political groups left of the governing Socialist Workers Party of Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez before elections next year.

Carrillo and his backers opposed the strategy, arguing that the party should not attempt to seek power by abandoning traditional Communist ideology.

Since its legalization in 1976, the Communist Party had been wracked by inner turmoil between its pro-Soviet faction and the more moderate group favoring a European-oriented communism independent of the Soviet Union.

Carrillo originally led the party in this Eurocommunist direction after his break with Moscow over the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia but later reversed position.