The assassination came as a shock, but also as a relief for many. ETA, who would later leave such a bloody stain on Spanish history, had apparently done the regime’s enemies a huge favour. Carrero Blanco left a large authoritarian hole which his successor as prime minister was unable to fill.
But that was of secondary importance. Franco was ever closer to death, and this ‘biological imperative’ – as the regime euphemistically referred to his inevitable demise – meant that all minds were focused on what would come next. What would happen to Spain without its modern-day El Cid?
1 He was denied entry into the secretive organisation, and later amassed a large private collection of Masonic memorabilia; his father and many Republican leaders were Masons.
2 One of them was John Lennon, for the filming of How I Won the War in Almería. During his stay he was visited by a local schoolteacher who used Beatles songs to teach children English. The result of this interview was that Sgt. Pepper’s subsequently had the lyrics printed on the back sleeve, the first time this had ever happened on an LP record.
3 The phrase ‘Spain is different’ was coined at this time by Francoist minister Manuel Fraga to help sell the country as an exotic holiday destination to foreigners. It still rankles among many Spaniards today, who feel it demeans their country.
TRANSITIONS
On 20 November 1975 Franco finally died. The television announcer broke down in tears, as did half the country. The other half rushed out to buy champagne and cava, emptying the nation’s shelves of bubbly overnight. On the surface, everything was different, but underneath it was all the same: a country eternally divided against itself marking a key moment in its history in diametrically opposed ways. What would come next?
There were reasons to fear for the future: violent regionalism had not only made a comeback in the shape of ETA, but had done so in spectacular fashion with Carrero Blanco’s assassination. Meanwhile, left-wing opposition parties had been operating in secret, waiting for the day when the dictator died and they could spring back into action. It was time to right the wrongs of the past. The Civil War had begun almost forty years before; no one could forget the wave of violence which had brought Franco to power. Or could they?
In 1969 Franco had named his successor. Despite refusing to reinstate the monarchy while alive, he would bring it back after his death. Alfonso XIII had died in Mussolini’s Rome in 1941 and the natural choice would have been his heir, Juan. But Juan was unloved, having already forged and broken alliances with almost everyone – even exiled Socialists – in an attempt to get rid of Franco and claim Spain for himself. Instead of Juan, Franco decided to skip a generation and name Juan’s son, Juan Carlos, as the next Spanish head of state.
Not everyone in the regime was happy with this decision. Juan still had a few supporters, while the Falangists weren’t even ideological monarchists to begin with. Both mocked the future king and nicknamed him Juan Carlos el Breve – ‘the Brief’. Few imagined that he would survive for very long.
But survive he did, and in a surprisingly short time following Franco’s death, Spain moved effortlessly from being an authoritarian dictatorship to becoming a fully functioning, constitutional, democratic monarchy. Without a shot being fired . . .
Or at least that’s the story that has been told, the myth, the official version of how Spain, after centuries of internal conflict and warfare and division and military coups, finally became a modern country, one in which fighting was no longer the principal means through which it addressed the great questions of state. It’s a story which has worked very well, and many people still cling to it, convinced that everything is now different, that the ways of the past are gone, never to return.
But where does this assumption come from? What exactly is this belief that ‘we don’t do things like that any more’ based upon? The habits of over a thousand years are deeply engrained and have repeated themselves time after time. Why should they be broken now?
The simple answer is that it is wishful thinking combined with a certain amount of hubris. And it is largely built on the successful storytelling around the Transición – the country’s ‘peaceful’ progression from dictatorship to democracy. But that very story is now being questioned. Fewer and fewer Spaniards today accept its ‘truths’. There is a growing sense that a convenient yarn has been spun, one which doesn’t give the whole picture and which is starting to unravel. New versions are emerging of a far more complex process which, over forty years after Franco died, is far from complete. Did Francoism ever really go away? Is it correct, in fact, to talk of a ‘transition’ at all?
The man at the centre of the official version of the Transición is King Juan Carlos, the hero of the tale, the knight in shining armour who confounded his detractors and, in conjunction with a small group of close advisors, managed to navigate the good ship Spain through the choppy waters of end-of-dictatorship and into the calm, bright, sunlit seas of democracy and prosperity. According to this story, Juan Carlos and his friends were secretly planning from before Franco’s death to turn the country into a constitutional monarchy. When the Caudillo died and Juan Carlos became the new head of state, they put their plan into action, drafting a new democratic Constitution and uniting many political factions on both left and right to bury the hatchet, put aside their differences, and help build a new country. Elections were held, and Spain marched happily into her better future. And when diehard Francoists tried to put the clock back, staging a coup attempt in 1981 by storming the parliament building, Juan Carlos was there on his steed again, a kinder incarnation of Santiago the Slayer, smiting the enemy of the new Spain down (without having to resort to violence, but the effect was the same) and assuring once and for all that democracy was here to stay, that the age of military coups was finally over. It was a success: rebellious generals were locked away, a Socialist government – unthinkable only a few years before – was voted in shortly afterwards, and Juan Carlos basked in his vindication as a force for good. Monarchy, with its long history of instability in the country, was firmly established.
And the story after that is one of continued success: Spain joined NATO and the European Economic Community, later the European Union. Earnings went up, people became wealthier and more comfortable, governments came and went, but always according to the norms of a stable democracy. Spain became a fully fledged member of the club of prosperous post-WWII Western European nations. History was buried. There were no more ‘events’ (or any that came would be of the slightly dull, democratic variety).
The End.
Except that it wasn’t, and it isn’t. Today ‘history’ is at the forefront of Spanish public life. Catalan regionalism has flared up again in spectacular fashion. The monarchy is back in crisis: following a long family tradition of stealing from the State it is meant to represent, the current king’s brother-in-law is doing time for corruption, while there are serious questions about how Juan Carlos, who abdicated under a cloud in 2014, amassed his own fortune, allegedly squirrelled away in Swiss bank accounts. The Republican flag, which ten or fifteen years ago was a rare sight, is everywhere today – in graffiti, flying at political marches, hanging from balconies. Against this backdrop, mass graves from the Civil War are being excavated all the time, reopening wounds from a conflict which (supposedly) ended eighty years ago. And every so often some high-ranking military official is caught making interventionist-type comments that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1920s and ’30s. Meanwhile, buried deep at the heart of a mountain, in a gigantic and macabre mausoleum of his own design, Franco should be turning in his grave because as I write these words the Spanish government is initiating moves to dig the Generalísimo up and move him somewhere less visible. Everywhere you look, the ‘past’ is on the move, the old patterns of behaviour rearing up once more.
And the reason is that it never went away; it was simply that, for the sake of the Transición, everyone pretended that it had. Spain, as she so often has, drew a veil over unwante
d parts of her history in an attempt to forge a new future.
The sentiments behind the transition to democracy were largely noble: to bring about a very rare and almost impossible change of regime in the country’s history without violence. To do so, all manner of compromises and deals had to be done in order to keep a people with a tendency to self-harm from turning once more to civil war. The people with the most to lose were also the most heavily armed: hard-line Francoists within the military, the búnker as they were called, in an echo of Hitler’s last stand at Berlin. Keeping them pacified was of utmost importance. So, for example, the Francoist State was never fully dismantled: Francoist institutions were kept in place, while Francoist laws remained – and still remain – on the statute books, and were only superseded when new, democratic, laws replaced them in piecemeal fashion. The Constitution of 1978 established a democratic monarchy, but in effect this new Spain was given a blessing by the old one – without a clean break. Yet how could a state which itself had been born out of a military coup – and which was therefore illegitimate – give legitimacy to its successor?
And just how democratic is Spain? Yes, there are elections, and yes, governments come and go. But there is a congenital lack of transparency about everything. Rather than having internal elections to decide their candidates, the main traditional political parties have closed lists, unaccountable to anyone but themselves. This creates an ideal ground for corruption in which no one dares blow the whistle for fear of expulsion from the group. Not surprisingly, those cases that are investigated are often – although not always – after the person in question has left office and is in a much weaker position to cajole any potential witnesses into silence. Many millions of euros (and before them, pesetas) have been hoarded in recent decades through such schemes as re-designating stretches of countryside as ‘constructible’ (sometimes after an entirely accidental and fortuitous forest fire), with politicians taking large kickbacks from the speculators who then pile in and build on the site. Examples of this and many more corruption scandals (such as siphoning off funds from a charity for impoverished African children) are legion, so much so that one repentant corrupt official talks of an ‘addiction’, describing himself and others as ‘money-junkies’. The courts go after who they can, when they can, but there is a general sense in Spain – and one that has become much worse over recent years – that anyone in a position of power has their hand in the till in some way, no matter what political persuasion they profess.
Politics, in the new Spain, is less about ideology and nation-building than a means through which to divvy up the spoils of power. You only have to watch State television for a couple of minutes to know who is in charge: any change at the top is quickly followed by a ruthless sweeping away of the old newsreaders in favour of ones more in keeping with the new ruling party’s image.
The lack of accountability and sense of real democracy isn’t helped by the electoral system. In a complex set-up, the parties coming first and second in the polls take the lion’s share of the vote, forcing a bi-party state on a country in which – at a national level – there are now four or five principal parties which run very close to one another in the polls. Added to this is a measure intended to give greater weight to the more underpopulated areas of the country – which are generally more conservative. Which produces bizarre results in which, for example, the vote of someone from the province of Soria (total population: ninety thousand) is worth five times more than that of someone from a major city. Yet a system designed to produce political stability has more often than not caused hung parliaments, most of which have only managed to govern by doing deals with the Catalan nationalists, whose ultimate aim is to break away from the Spanish state altogether . . .
Spanish democracy is so flawed that some describe it bluntly as a ‘pseudo-democracy’, a sham. Even token democratic norms such as freedom of speech come regularly under threat; try criticising the king or other State institutions openly and you can quickly find yourself in jail. One Spanish rapper has sought asylum in Belgium from Spanish justice, which has given him a three-and-a-half-year sentence for, amongst other things, ‘insulting the king’ in one of his lyrics.
And it is precisely the figure of the king which is at the centre of this unravelling of the Transición fairy tale. From having been a national hero, Juan Carlos is close to becoming a pariah, while his son and successor, Felipe VI, has failed to unite the country behind him in the way that his father once managed to do.
Part of the problem is that many now question the key element in the Juan Carlos myth – his role in the coup attempt of 1981. According to the official story, it was Juan Carlos’s intervention, appearing on State television in full military dress to denounce the plotters, which saved the day. Duly castigated, the rebel generals and their minions put away their guns and handed themselves in. It had been a close-run thing, but democracy had prevailed and Juan Carlos was the hero of the moment.
Today, however, many question this. According to some versions that are now told – by historians Jesús Palacios and Juan Eslava Galán amongst others – Juan Carlos was in on the plot to begin with. The government was unstable and the country, still navigating those choppy waters, appeared close to the brink once more: in stark contrast to the ‘peaceful’ transition story which has frequently been told, ETA was going through its bloodiest phase in its demand for Basque independence, with regionalism provoking fears at the centre of another break-up of the country.1 Order was meant to be imposed by a ‘liberal’ general – Juan Carlos’s close friend Alfonso Armada – who would set up a government of national unity which would include parties from both Left and Right. But the plan backfired. The man holding parliament at gunpoint, Colonel Tejero – an unwitting pawn in a bigger game – refused to cooperate when the true plan was put to him. Fifteen minutes later Juan Carlos appeared on TV, and by the morning it was all over. The coup had come to naught. But according to some, Juan Carlos wasn’t the only person in the know: almost everyone, including the Socialist Party, was in on it as well. The whole thing was meant to be no more than a ‘show’ which would facilitate the reimposition of order.
The Spanish establishment sticks to the original version of events, with former prime minister Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo describing Juan Carlos’s role as ‘brilliant’. ‘That night he won his throne as his ancestors did.’ But this is a view which ever fewer Spaniards appear to share.
Parallels between the Tejero coup of 1981 and Serrano’s – which brought an end to the First Republic and the restoration of the monarchy in 1874 – have often been made. On both occasions the military stormed parliament, with generals sitting in the wings waiting to appear as ‘saviours of the nation’ at its time of need. The difference is that – ostensibly at least – the 1981 coup failed and General Armada and the others ended up behind bars. And yet the system that was installed in Spain as a result bears a close resemblance to the state created by Cánovas at the end of the nineteenth century: a constitutional monarchy with a bi-party system in which the government alternates in a generally regular fashion between Left and Right. A system which is endemically corrupt and in which large numbers of the population feel themselves to be unrepresented.
The Restoration period lasted for twenty-five years, but then came under increasing strain, first with a change of monarch (the arrival of Alfonso XIII) and then under pressure from regional groups reigniting their ancient struggles. Eventually it collapsed with Alfonso’s exile, and the proclamation of a Second Republic, which in turn was immolated in the Civil War.
Does the same violent fate await today’s Spain?
1 In a less-than-democratic move, the State was soon to set up a terror group of its own in response, the GAL, a dirty operations unit which was meant to give ETA members a taste of their own medicine; some of the GAL’s victims were indeed linked to the Basque group, but others were innocent citizens targeted by mistake. Two government ministers, including the Interior Minister, would eventual
ly go to jail for their role in the scandal.
CONCLUSION: THE LAST KING OF SPAIN
Felipe VI came to the throne in 2014 under a cloud; around him the reputation of the royal family was approaching meltdown. Felipe’s father, Juan Carlos, abdicated two years after it was claimed that public money had been spent flying him home following an accident on an elephant-hunting trip in Botswana. A photo of the king standing triumphantly next to a dead elephant (which had been shot by someone else) was on the front page of all the newspapers. There was a collective intake of breath: Juan Carlos, who had appeared such a clever reader of public opinion, who had managed to survive so much longer than anyone had ever suspected he would, was suddenly showing himself to be totally out of step with his subjects. The combination of elephant-hunting and alleged use of public funds (calculated at 44,000 euros, roughly twice the average annual salary) for his return at a time when food banks were increasingly busy across the country was a serious blow. Not only that, the king was the honorary head of the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Fund; killing large game didn’t exactly fit, and he was subsequently stripped of his title.
All this came while Juan Carlos’s own daughter and son-in-law were coming under investigation for corruption. The Infanta Cristina was later cleared, but Iñaki Urdangarín was eventually sentenced to five years and ten months in jail for tax evasion.1 This and other rumours surrounding the Spanish royal family meant that its image was seriously damaged. Juan Carlos effectively sacrificed himself in an attempt to preserve the monarchy.
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