protest movement was a 1967 demonstration that drew some 100,000 workers to the streets of Madrid demanding “Franco no, democracy yes” (Gilmore 1985: 105). These mobilizations provided a counterbalancing effect to the rising elite-led transition. As contended by Maravall (1981: 15), the early days of the transition encapsulated “two counteracting dynamics; the dynamic of reform, negotiation, and pacts from above, promoted by regime reformists, and on the other, the dynamic of pressure and protest from below.”
On the advice of his closest political mentors, the king’s democratizing agenda called for a process of regime change that “did not violate the essential spirit of franquismo” (Podolny 1992: 90). For all intents and purposes, this meant a process of democratization that, born out of the very structures of the Franco regime, was free of any reprisal against the representatives of the authoritarian state. At the helm of this process was Adolfo Suárez, a Francoist official (head of the Movimiento Nacional, the closest thing to a political party in the Franco regime, and former director of the national television services), and generally presumed to be a member of the renovadores, a group of Francoist insiders committed to the reformation of the regime from the inside out. Indeed, Suárez’s commitment to reforming the authoritarian state proved decisive in his selection by the king to head the transition to democracy.
Suárez replaced Carlos Arias Navarro, the last prime minister under Franco, who was dismissed from his post in July 1976 after proving a weak and indecisive leader in executing the king’s demands for a speedy but orderly transition to democracy. Just before Franco’s death in 1975, Arias Navarro proposed a set of political reforms, including the legalization of political “associations” (which avoided the much-dreaded “parties” label). But these reforms never made it out of the Francoist parliament. Such policy failures generated massive mobilizations by the general public in favor of the country’s return to democracy. Arias Navarro’s inept response to popular demands for political reform was to ratchet up political repression, a move that generated international condemnation of the Franco regime, including threats of an economic boycott by Western European trading partners.3
Given his intimate association with the Franco regime, Suárez’s appointment came as a big disappointment for those hoping for a swift exit from nearly four decades of Francoism. “An historic error,” was the characterization of communist leader Ramón Tamanes.4 Yet Suárez was ideally suited for reforming the Franco regime from the inside out, a political transformation that had “no clear parallel or analogy in twentieth-century political systems” (Payne 1985: 25). Besides possessing a deep familiarity with the structures of the Franco regime, Suárez was young (forty-three), photogenic, and a master diplomat. The last trait allowed him to develop close ties and considerable trust with the democratic opposition in a remarkably short period of time. Soon after his appointment as prime minister in July 1976, Suárez began to organize secret talks, often late at night in Madrid restaurants, with the leaders of the still-illegal socialist and communist parties to convince them he had every intention of establishing a Western-style democracy.
To prove that his democratizing intentions were real, Suárez ordered an amnesty policy on June 30, 1976, that freed some political prisoners jailed by Franco and ended the harassment of left-wing leaders by the police, many of whom were returning to Spain for the first time after decades of exile abroad. Although criticized by some quarters on the left as insufficient, Suárez’s amnesty was widely praised by others, such as the left-leaning El País, a new liberal newspaper that quickly established itself as Spain’s paper of record, which termed it “the best possible of amnesties, although not the most comprehensive or the most desirable of amnesties” (Aguilar 2002: 193). The 1976 amnesty law, enacted as a royal decree, was also intended to plant the seeds for a central theme of the eventual democratic transition: the usefulness of forgetting as a way to overcome the divisions of the past and embark on a peaceful democratic future. The preamble to the law explicitly advocates forgetting the past as a precondition for peaceful democratic coexistence: “As Spain is now heading toward a fully normal democratic state, the moment has come to complete this process by forgetting any discriminatory legacy of the past in the full fraternal harmony of all Spaniards” (quoted in Aguilar 2002: 193).
In keeping with the king’s wishes for democratization, Suárez wisely remained deferential toward the Franco regime by insisting that its very institutions were being employed as democracy’s midwife. In this way, the transition to democracy was made legitimate under Francoist law. This explains common characterizations of the political reforms instituted in 1976 as “cross-eyed” since the reforms managed to accomplish two seemingly incompatible demands: full democracy for the historic opposition to the Franco regime led by the communist and socialist parties and constitutional continuity for Francoist authoritarians. On November 18, 1976, working in consultation with speaker of the Francoist Assembly Torcuato Fernández Miranda, the “Fundamental Laws,” the guiding legal framework of the Franco regime, were amended with the passage of the Law of Political Reform. This was an enormous victory for Suárez; only 15 percent of the deputies refused to endorse the law.
Suárez’s reform package called for the legalization of political parties and independent unions, freedom of association, the right to strike, dissolution of the Francoist parliament and the Organización Sindical Española (OSE), a corporatist syndicate that incorporated both employers and workers, and scheduling of democratic elections.5 No reference of any kind to the issue of justice against the old regime or reparations to its victims was incorporated into the text. On December 15, 1976, the Law of Political Reform was put to a national referendum, garnering 94.1 percent approval from the electorate on a turnout of about 80 percent of eligible voters. In essence, Suárez succeeded in forcing the Franco regime to self-liquidate while allowing the old regime to dictate the terms of the transition and accrue considerable power to shape the politics and institutions of the emerging democracy.
In no small part due to his skillful and expedient management of the transition, Suárez emerged the undisputed winner of the national elections on June 15, 1977. He was “the best-known politician in Spain, and the one perceived as the most capable of solving a whole series of problems—prices, public order, unemployment, strikes and the inauguration of democracy” (Tusell Gómez 1985: 95). Suárez’s Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD), a coalition of fourteen small parties of a center-right orientation, won 34.6 percent of all votes and 47.4 percent of parliamentary seats. The Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) came in second, with 29.4 percent of all votes and 33.7 percent of parliamentary seats. The Partido Comunista Español (PCE) tallied an embarrassing third place finish, with 9.3 percent of all votes and 5.7 percent of parliamentary seats, barely ahead of the neo-Francoist Alianza Popular (AP), which managed to get 8.8 percent of all votes and 4.6 percent of parliamentary seats. With this victory, Suárez was entrusted with governing the nation through the “Constituent” period, which concluded with another national election in 1979, which Suárez also won with 35 percent of all votes. Table 2 shows the configuration of political forces in Spain between 1977 and 1979.
Table 2. Spain’s First Post-Transition Elections (1977 and 1979)
Source: Spanish Interior Ministry.
The Left and the Missing Past During the Transition
Remarkably, Spain underwent the transition to democracy without calls for justice against the old regime from the democratic opposition—not even a formal condemnation of its evils was demanded. During the 1977 elections the issue of justice against the Franco regime generated virtually no attention. Curiously, the PCE, the last party to be legalized in anticipation of the elections, was the most decisive in making public its desire not to delve into discussions about the past and advocating for outright forgetting. The PCE, according to Aguilar (2002: 244), “did everything in its power not to stir up the old and difficult memories of its role during the Civil War.” Nowhere
