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 in the position papers of PCE party leaders during the transition can one find even passing reference to the issue of retribution toward the Franco regime (Carrillo 1965, 1967).
Instead of pushing for transitional justice, the PCE focused its demands on the creation of a provisional government of national unity that excluded members of the old regime and a referendum on whether Spain should adopt a monarchical or republican form of government.6 After the 1977 Law of Political Reform was enacted, the PCE proposal for a provisional government and a referendum on the monarchy was rendered moot since the law was widely interpreted as “a vote in favor of the monarchy” (Aguilar 2002: 170) and the communists began to press for a broad amnesty accord as their biggest objective.7 In his speeches during the 1977 electoral campaign, PCE general secretary Santiago Carrillo announced that in the first parliamentary session the main objective of the communists would be “an amnesty law for prisoners and exiles.”8
The socialists also skirted the issue of justice for the old regime. After the return of the PSOE leadership from exile in France in 1974, the party began to mobilize the general public with calls for dissolution of all repressive institutions and extension of rights to all persons deprived of them for political or trade union activity (see González 1976; González and Guerra 1977). But these calls were intended to demand “the introduction of democratic reforms and not the expulsion or trials of those guilty of repression” (Aguilar 2001: 100). By the 1977 elections, PSOE legislative priorities were listed as: (1) amnesty law; (2) law of political parties; and (3) dissolution of repressive laws.9
Even radical left-wing groups that did not support the establishment of democracy in Spain chose not to raise the possibility of military trials, bureaucratic purges, or any other type of retribution toward the old regime. Far-left groups such as the Revolutionary Communist League limited their demands to dismantling the Franco regime and its repressive apparatus. Not even ETA, by far the most radical force outside the mainstream political establishment during the democratic transition, had anything to say about transitional justice. Instead, like other revolutionary movements of the period, ETA members chose to distance themselves from the democratization process in Madrid in protest against what they perceived as an illegitimate transition to democracy, since neither the right nor the left approved of the principle of regional self-determination. Herri Batasuna, ETA’s political branch, branded the democratic transition “the pure continuity of Francoism” (Laiz 1995: 256).
For the entire duration of the democratic transition, the only significant breach of the silence over the past came from the leaders of the PSP, a small socialist party that eventually merged with the PSOE. During the parliamentary deliberations over the draft of a new constitution enacted by popular referendum in 1978, PSP president Enrique Tierno Galván, a former university professor turned politician (he was elected to the Congress of Deputies from the province of Madrid in 1977 and subsequently elected mayor of Madrid in the first provincial elections of 1979), proposed that the preamble of the constitution include a brief statement referring to “a long period without a constitutional regime, of negation of public freedoms, and lack of recognition of the rights of nationalities and regions that make up the unity of Spain” (Balfour and Quiroga 2007: 45). He argued that “forgetting the past completely is forgetting those who have suffered the consequences of the past. There is a large sector of the Spanish people who cannot be forgotten; those who have suffered, and the least they deserve is that reference be made to this past, because thanks to their suffering we are winning today.” Tierno Galván’s eloquent pleas failed to garner support from either Santiago Carrillo of the PCE or Felipe González of the PSOE, and in the end these pleas were drowned by the right-wing opposition led by AP, which contended that the constitution’s preamble “should leave history in peace” (Balfour and