[The European Conservative] The Failure of Spanish Democracy

A year out from a general election, the country’s factions no longer honor one another.

In some ways, the career of the mandarin-turned-lawyer, Rodrigo Galán, 62 and soon to retire, tracks the vagaries of Spain’s 44-year democratic experiment, and forebodes its future. In 1974, with Franco ill and indisposed, Galán tested the caudillo’s stultifying autocracy when, at an unauthorized rally eventually dispersed by riot-police, he clamoured for independent unions at Madrid’s Complutense law faculty. As someone with grandparents on both sides of the Civil War (1936–39), he cites the 1977 amnesty law as the crowning achievement of the post-Franco transition, when Spain consigned its grudges to history’s dustbin, and came together in “one big hug,” as he puts it. Thereafter, he toiled for Spain to join NATO, in 1982, and the EU, in 1986. For Galán, the development and success of Spain’s parliamentary monarchy was a very personal matter.

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