Word: gonzã
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...Well, it looks like they've pulled it off," said one Western ambassador in Madrid as a wide smile spread across his face. There were similar signs of relief around Europe and in Washington last week after Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonz??lez Márquez achieved a remarkable turnaround in public opinion and won a referendum that will keep Spain in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...
Only a week before the election, most polls had predicted that Gonz??lez would go down to a crushing defeat in the vote and be forced to make Spain the first country to withdraw totally from the 16-member alliance. But when the votes were counted, the pro-NATO group had won by a surprisingly large margin. The final tally showed 52.5% for continued membership, 39.8% for withdrawal, and the rest of the ballots blank or invalid...
...Gonz??lez called the vote a "triumph for the Spanish people." It was also a triumph for Gonz??lez. He had taken office in 1982 on an anti-NATO platform, but then changed his mind and supported continued Spanish membership. During the campaign, he hinted that he would resign and call early elections if he lost. "I always said that the final result depended on Felipe's final address, and I wasn't far wrong," said Foreign Ministry Spokesman Inocencio Arias. After lying low for much of the prevoting skirmishes, Gonz??lez pulled out all the stops in the last...
...would have to pull out of the European Community, which it had just joined on Jan. 1, or be a "second-rate" partner. Another official hinted that Barcelona would lose its bid for the 1992 Olympics and that plans for a World's Fair in Seville would be scuttled. Gonz??lez, in a last, powerful address that mentioned the Atlantic Alliance only twice and peace 40 times, warned darkly of "political instability," which is something the Spaniards, now in their tenth year of democracy, have reason to fear. Lamented one opposition leader: "They have warned us of everything except...
...streets, calling President Reagan a murderer and demanding that their country withdraw from NATO. The protesters mirrored the official positions of most European governments. When the U.S. planes went into Libya, only the British government of Margaret Thatcher actively supported Reagan. The Mitterrand-Chirac administration in France, like Felipe Gonz??lez Márquez's government in Spain, refused to let U.S. aircraft overfly the two countries. The Italian government of Bettino Craxi harshly criticized the operation, while Helmut Kohl's West Germany was anxiously quiet. TIME's Paris bureau chief, Jordan Bonfante, sent this report on the new strain...