On November 20, 1975, only Francisco Franco died. Only. In power for 39 years and dying in his bed after agonizing days, who knows if his death coincided with that of the regime’s reluctant hero, José Antonio Primo de Rivera … . After his death, tens of thousands of citizens would go to pay homage to him, and an escorted artillery cannon, with a greater intention than one might suppose to take him away from Madrid and the Pardo (which was the expected location), would take him to what was supposed to be his eternal rest in the so-called Valley of the Fallen, at the foot of Guadarrama. Two days later, the Franco Cortes, in accordance with the Succession Law of 1947 in which Spain had been officially constituted as a “Kingdom”, and after the designation of a successor in 1969, would proclaim Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón King of Spain, after taking an oath in the Fundamental Laws of the Kingdom. An absolute king appears on the scene at the head of the Spanish state. It is therefore surprising, although the date is representative as a milestone, that the current socialist government insisted on commemorating, with certainly describable success, “50 years of free Spain”, when this was certainly not the case. No way. If a political guru wanted to redefine the once very popular 20-N in this way, which had ceased to be so for decades among new generations, it is not that he was completely wrong. Worse still, this day was marked by events which had nothing to do with a past as distant as half a century ago, but rather with the most burning legal news. Some call it “karma.”
The problem with exorcising ghosts is that you can make them corporeal. And what was as old in 2025 as Alphonse’s death. In Spain there has always been a lack of pedagogy in relation to what the existing type of monarchy implies, is and means, as well as a political culture that understands and understands the Spanish singularity derived from a rich and complex history. And tragic. To deny it would be to deceive the solitary. Although I fear that is what we also did with the Spanish transition.
The transition wasn’t perfect. The worst enemy of truth is memories. They deceive us by wanting to suppress what we don’t want to remember because it makes us uncomfortable. This happens to those who look forward to the 80s as a period of unprecedented freedom and openness, but forget about those years the great problem of drugs, AIDS, unsafe streets and quinquisme. The same thing is happening to us with this political period. We tend to underestimate the so-called “years of lead”, where ETA murdered between two and three people per week, one after the other. As we also do not want to remember the tensions in the streets, like the terrible attack of Atocha against labor lawyers, or those “guerrillas of Christ the King” who invaded almost unpunished by hitting “the reds” with nunchucks; or when they wanted to attack Torcuato Luca de Tena or the cries of “Tarancón to the wall”. We forget that there was also the Grapo terror, the wildcat strikes, the student riots, which ended up causing deaths thanks to the intervention of the armed police (the famous and feared “grays”), all in a confusing environment to see where it was going. Or maybe it was planned to happen.
After the proclamation of King Don Juan Carlos, the left opposition in exile, such as the PSOE, believes that there is no sign of rupture, but rather Francoist continuity. A historical leader who would later be a fundamental element of what would be called “the consensus,” Santiago Carrillo, called the king “Juan Carlos I, the Brief.” November 1975 does not begin to count “freedom”. And, if you press me, not even the Transition, which is my own reflection and which is not usual among political scientists and historians. However, how can we understand the events that will begin to occur without the years preceding, the first of the 70s, the death of Franco? The position among the most fervent defenders of continuity, which we will call “the bunker”, begins to strengthen its positions in the face of the obvious fragility of the regent of a kingdom without a king, as if he were a Serrano, becoming in a certain way the last sword of the 19th century in a century that was not his.
How can we leave aside the attack and assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco, pillar of the regime, in 1973? How can we not understand what the government of Carlos Arias Navarro was and his project of opening with the “spirit of February 12” of 1974? Like the change that occurs with the appointment of Adolfo Suárez and the secondary figures of Carmen Díaz de Rivera or “the magnificent seven”, with Manuel Fraga at the helm? Or that of Felipe González moving away from Marxism and refounding the PSOE. And above all, the character who will put everything straight: that of Torcuato Fernández-Miranda, who will write the VIII Fundamental Law, the last of the Franco regime now without Franco, which will be known under the name of the Political Reform Law, and who will legitimize the one who had sworn in his proclamation of said laws to be thus proclaimed king. This had saved him from being considered a perjurer.
And with this ruse of Don Torcuato the desideratum became real, not of a rupture, but of what, passing “from Law to Law”, will result in a constituent process. The Francoist Cortes will not commit the “haraquiri”, as is so often wrongly repeated, since they do not “commit suicide”, and even less as a result of a loss of honor, which is what sepuku implies, but they will consciously give way to what is going to happen: the calling of free elections. Therefore, I believe it is acceptable to consider the beginning of this freedom on June 15, 1977, the date of these and, without doubt for me, the beginning of Spanish democracy on December 15, 1976, when the Spanish people spoke and approved the aforementioned reform law that would pave the way for the subsequent Constitution of 1978, and where it was clear that they wanted to embark on a path of tolerance, reconciliation and peace.