12. The Strange Birth of a ‘Parliamentary Monarchy’: The Fascists¶
Core Argument¶
The Spanish Transition was not a clean break with Francoism but a carefully managed operation to preserve the old order under a democratic façade. The Francoist Bunker clung to key state positions, while fascist gangs—Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey, falangists, and Fuerza Nueva—operated with impunity as an auxiliary arm of the state, cooperating with police. Yet these were never a serious mass force; they received derisory electoral support and were ridiculed by the press representing industrial and finance capital. The ruling class kept them on a short leash, using them as auxiliary thugs while preventing them from taking power.
The dictatorship’s last props were crumbling. In December 1976, 700 Civil Guard and armed police demonstrated in Madrid for higher pay and reform of their military status, claiming 80,000 of 90,000 police nationwide were sympathetic. A young Civil Guard explained that economic demands were a detonator for their real problem: being social outcasts and a repressive machine for their superiors. The armed forces were similarly fracturing; conscripts—workers’ sons—carried the revolutionary bacillus, and after the Vitoria massacre of March 1976, soldiers refused live ammunition and confronted police in barracks.
Adolfo Suárez, appointed by the king, invented the UCD—a coalition of ex-Franco ‘democrats’, liberals, social democrats, and Christian Democrats—portrayed as a democratic champion. It attracted right-wing careerists and caciques who shed their blue shirts for democracy, an optical illusion analogous to former Bulgarian fascists converting to Stalinism or Soviet Communists later embracing capitalism. Many former Francoists abandoned all principles to join the most convenient bandwagon, while in Catalonia, Franco-era mayors were recycled into the bourgeois nationalist CiU.
The June 1977 election was rigged in favour of the right. The electoral system over-represented rural conservative regions, the Senate had 41 members appointed by the king, and voting was restricted to those over 21, excluding 2 million youths and 1 million emigrants who would have voted left. The UCD and AP together won an absolute majority of seats with only 42.6% of the vote. The left’s leaders, particularly the PCE and PSOE, had already agreed to let ex-Francoist ‘new democrats’ lead the Transition. The PCE’s poor result stemmed from its abandonment of Leninism and pursuit of moderation, making concessions to the monarchy and Suárez.
The Spanish monarchy, re-imposed by Franco, was false, deceitful, and corrupt to the marrow. A 1977 letter from King Juan Carlos to the Shah of Persia requested $10 million, falsely claiming the UCD was at a financial disadvantage when it enjoyed a monopoly of state media and backing from bankers. The king took the largest share. To survive, Suárez deepened the policy of ‘pacts and consensus’, culminating in the Moncloa Pacts of October 1977, which capped wage rises below inflation, devalued the peseta, and allowed bosses to sack five per cent of the workforce. The PCE, PSOE and trade union leaders signed up, demobilising workers and cutting living standards.
The weakness of the ruling class was offset by workers’ leaders refusing to take power, creating an unstable equilibrium that fostered Bonapartist tendencies. Under the 1978 Constitution, the king became head of state, head of the armed forces, and guarantor of national unity, with powers to appoint governments, dissolve parliament, declare war, and absolute immunity. The Spanish people were never given a referendum on monarchy versus republic. Suárez later confessed he had practiced a colossal deception, avoiding a referendum because surveys showed they would lose. Instead, the words ‘king’ and ‘monarchy’ were slipped into the 1977 Law of Political Reform, tricking the people into accepting the monarchy—a product of consensus between the old regime and workers’ leaders who bargained away workers’ rights in secret negotiations.