Spain before the mirror

Ferran Sáez Mateu
3 min

In the amusement parks of the late 19th or early 20th centuries, the Hall of Mirrors, with its variety of distorted reflections, was all the rage. The one in Tibidabo was installed in 1905 to great public success. Today Spain is a gigantic hall of mirrors that reflect grotesque images: that of the progressive who in the 1970s was a republican and is now a fervent supporter of the monarchy (e.g. any dinosaur of the PSOE old guard chosen at random), and that of the fascist who in the 1970s also was republican, but exactly because of his belief in the "pending Falangist revolution" (e.g. Aznar -no need to look further). The spectacle is guaranteed: the abdication of King Juan Carlos and the constitutionally regulated succession of his son, the future King Felipe VI, has put all of Spain in one of these halls where the "trompe-l'oeil" and conscious self-deception go hand in hand. Last week, even the Spanish journalists whom I used to see when I was a boy on that ashy-grey TV of the Transition chanted the now played out cliché of juancarlos-ism. They droned on about it just like, every two or three sentences, they utter the phrase "considering how difficult things are these days", now obligatory on the political talk shows. For the moment then, the mirror is from a shabby amusement park, or maybe even a dinky street fair: it seems rather unthinkable that a deep debate about the recent history of Spain will happen because of the abdication of the King. Repeating the phrase "considering how difficult things are these days" seems to be more than enough.

Let's begin by remembering something that, while obvious, is not mentioned often enough: King Juan Carlos is not king by direct dynastic continuity -among other things, his father never ruled-, but only because General Franco designated him as successor "with the title of king" in 1969. "I believe that the moment has come to propose Prince Don Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón to the Spanish Cortes as the person called in his day to succeed me, with the title of King. He has given irrefutable proof of his true patriotism and his total identification with the Principles of the Movement and Fundamental Laws of the Kingdom", says the preamble of Law 62/1969, made public on 23 July of that year. Obviously we shouldn't jump to conclusions merely from reading this text: any public employee or functionary also had to swear to those principles. There is no need to look further, for example, than all those university professors who later were significant in the opposition to General Franco's regime. That's not the point I'm making. What I want to emphasize is that the institutional presence of the king did not obey a restoration of the monarchy, but was merely a continuation of the Franco regime via the designation of a successor. Even though his successor had "the title of king", he was still the successor to General Franco, who had named him. Could we argue that, once the Constitution was voted in a referendum, Juan Carlos de Borbón became a democratically elected king? I think not, in as much as the Constitution was based on the institutional continuity of the Head of State, which was not interrupted even for a second during the Constitutional process.

I am convinced that this is a good time for Spain to openly admit that some of the fundamental points of the 1978 Constitution do not sit well with all that mythological "start from scratch" of the Transition. Rather, they are just the late (but not indirect: the nuance is important) result of the military coup on 18 July 1936. This debate, in my opinion, is possible and reasonable, in the sense that the vast majority of those who participated actively in the Civil War are already dead (people who were 18 in 1936 are 96 years old now). I'm not proposing any collective neurotic exercise in self-flagellation or anything like that. I'm only raising the possibility of verbalizing an undeniable fact: that Francoism was not left behind, but within. The ones who should start the debate first are precisely those who call themselves "constitutionalists". When you raise the flag of the Constitution you must, at least, have the consistency to accept it in its entirety and with all of its consequences (otherwise they shouldn't call themselves the "constitutional bloc").

I would like to hear more of these "constitutionalist" voices, both from the left and from the right, talk about the fact that the current head of State, who is still King Juan Carlos, is so due to a personal decision made by General Franco at the end of the 1960s. It's a question of standing before the mirror and talking face to face. With oneself, especially.

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