Within a few years, Spain would become an advanced democracy, a member of NATO and the European Communities, but November 20, 1975 was not a deterministic day. “When we talk about Salamis,” writes Huizinga, “we must do so as if the Persians could still win.” And 50 years ago no one could know who would win the future in Spain. Recalling that period, the Hispanist Trevor Dadson underlined a paradox: if the world celebrated the Spanish Transition, it is precisely because no one in the world had much faith that the Transition would go well. This was not an unnecessary caution, as would be seen, years later, in the transitions of the post-Soviet space. And in Spain in 1975 the Persians could also win. Franco was succeeded, as expected, by a traditional monarchy, with broad powers and aligned with the principles of the Movement. And from its kilometer zero, the Transition would have been accompanied, in a context of economic crisis, by the rattling of sabers and the bombings of an ETA which, for example, greeted the dawn of 1978 with 65 deaths. Naturally there were external pressures and, above all, an internal majority that wanted to upgrade the country to Western democracies. At the same time, there were no certainties to justify the hopes. And a Spain that for a century and a half has provided Europe with picturesqueness and anomalies could continue to do so different another time.
Diogo Noivo writes that the Portuguese transition was carried out by the left and consolidated by the right, while the Spanish transition was a right-wing movement that the left would make irrevocable. These are generalities, of course, that need to be taken with great salt. As far as Spain is concerned, in any case, they allow the conservative merit to be reinstated in our Transition. Conservators were many of its architects. The passage “from law to law” was conservative. The conservative was the paradigm of reform in the face of rupture or continuity, for it would be an exemplary conservative to demonstrate – whether to the ranks of others or to his own bunker – that political moderation can be achieved with fiery political will. In the Transition there were, therefore, characteristics of a conservative operation such as had not been seen since the time of Cánovas. With two special credits. First of all, the confirmation that in History there are great processes and material conditions, but men and their passions – the King and Suárez, Torcuato, Tarancón – continue to be decisive. And, secondly, the conception of conservatism as necessarily linked to reformism, as that leader of the conservatives, Edmund Burke, wanted. Yes, there is finally a conclusion to conservative skepticism: it could have been done better, but it is arrogant to think it could have been done perfectly.
Claiming the conservative imprint of the Transition is not so much a provocation as claiming a shared heritage. After all, from ’75 onwards everyone would do unexpected things that we would end up incorporating into a certain common mythology. Franco’s prosecutors vote for his ritual suicide. A former general secretary of the Movement legalizes the PCE. The communists display “the flag with the colors of the state” in their Central Committee. The Spanish socialists will abandon collectivism (15 years before the British Labor Party) and embark on an industrial revolution. When the political change is complete and the center-right returns to govern, it will in turn do other unexpected things, such as embracing political decentralization or condemning the military. Twenty-five years after Franco’s death, at a time when the center-right was winning with an absolute majority, Aznar stated: “Today the civil war as a political topic is over.”
It was an occasion for historical grandiloquence, but with these words Aznar also wanted to confirm something more practical: that the Spaniards were free from the need to be progressive. If in Franco’s time this progressive militancy might have seemed like an intimate and forced resistance, a consolidated democracy now only needs democrats. In practice, however, after 50 years, we can well think that things have not managed to be this way. Proof of this is that we continue to write about the possibility of being conservative after Franco’s death, when no one in Poland would doubt that it is possible to be social democratic after Jaruzelski. In Spanish democracy, progressives have behaved less like actors in a play than like owners of a theater. The Doberman of ’96, the Tinell of 2003 or the Wall of 2023 are examples of the moral inferiority recognized to a right whose exclusion, among other things, has never needed the company of any extreme right. Both in the academy and in popular culture, liberal-conservatism appears in Spain only as a quota or as a niche, and the foreign vision of our country is articulated exclusively through its progressive canon. All in all, the right will bear some blame when its moral leaders are still intellectuals converted from the left. Feijóo, who voted for the PSOE in his youth, has just confessed his love for left-wing songwriting: a shared space, at best; also, at worst, a symptom of the ancillary nature of the right in the Spanish cultural system. In short, the left projected onto the right the bad conscience that the dictator was dying of old age. Something surprising, because the question “where were you in 1972?” there are not many who can respond with full happiness either in our left or in our nationalisms.
The primacy of the left in Spanish democracy coagulated in the 1980s when the right was disoriented and divided. Only in the 1990s, with its liberal conversion, did the right begin to seduce majorities. Spanish democracy finally has its second fiddle. The PP now places the UCD as its “immediate political reference” and not its honorary president, Manuel Fraga. And faced with the “right-wing complex” of the previous decade, Aznar will claim that he does not suffer from “bad democratic conscience”. The rest is a story we still see and hear: the rise of the neoconservative model is followed, with Rajoy, by a technocratic retreat. The PP, in any case, is characterized as a liberal-conservative, broad-based, institutional and pro-European party of synthesis and concertation, intellectually inhibited by the desire to assemble sensitivities and, in any case, a friend of the middle ways which opens up the encounter between two ideals that are not always easy to objectify such as liberalism and Christian humanism. In any case, its very solidity and affirmation as a party were useful in the face of existential threats: the siege of Ciudadanos, the deterioration caused by corruption, the wear and tear of crisis management or the emergence of cainisms in the Casado years.
The novelty of these years for Spanish conservatism is that the PP is not only oppressed by the PSOE. Vox was born as a correction in matters of values: an authentic PP, before its repositioning in the international of identity law, where the wind of the times blows. Thus, while a rare discussion led FAES to accuse Vox of “corrupting conservatism”, the press had to quickly correct its aim to underline that the far right is no longer the new punk but nothing less than the new pop. Like the radical left, the Transition is of no use to the far right either: see its absence in the monarchical pageantry of these days. On November 20, 2000, Josep Ramoneda complained of an anniversary “surrounded by the indifference of citizens.” Twenty-five years later, we won’t say that it is an indirect homage, but Franco has forcefully returned to the discourse of the present. For a long time, when the far right looked to the past, quoted Franco and relied on the rhetoric of Blas Piñar, it did not get a single vote. Now she uses TikTok to talk about the future and the traditional right hasn’t yet found a way to stop her.
