ABSTRACT
The future that was not, or was it? A re-reading of the pages in the Lipset and Rokkan volume devoted to the future development of the Spanish political system is a strange experience (Linz 1967a, 264-75). Although the discontinuities in party politics meant that some words of caution were included there, the changes that took place between the 1930s and 1960s were much greater than those anticipated by most political observers. Those pages presented not only a wide range of scenarios and open possibilities, but also a number of predictions, many of which were fulfilled while others, actually or apparently, were disproved. In 1967, it was impossible to know if a monarchy, and particularly a constitutional monarchy, would be consolidated, or whether the alternative monarchy versus republic would become a major issue. Nor to imagine that the mechanisms of consensus that characterized the transition from the authoritarian regime would allow the legitimation of the monarchy in a democratic referendum, or that the role played by the King would confirm and seal the absence of debate on the question monarchy-republic. Spain thus became the only country of the third wave of democratization in which the transition process opened with the instauration, or the restoration, of a monarchy (Powell 1991; Podolny 1993). Other points made in that chapter were more debatable. The prediction that none of the many bourgeois Republican parties that played such an important role between 1931 and 1936 would reappear was validated. It did not seem unreasonable to expect that an extreme right-wing party defending continuity with the Franco regime would hold on to some voters. However, this would not happen, initially because, before the first free election, Adolfo Suárez, the prime minister, dissolved the official party and transferred its assets to the state. Furthermore, the existing neo-fascist parties were definitively weakened by the characteristics of the transition to democracy. The mechanisms of the reforma pactada-ruptura pactada (negotiated reform-negotiated break) in general, and particularly the formation of the UCD and the presence of AP (Alianza Popular), a conservative party committed to the democratic constitution without fully rejecting the past, deprived those parties nostalgic for the authoritarian regime of their electoral space (Linz et al. 1981). In addition, the
neo-fascist groups that did exist were both isolated and divided (Rodríguez Jiménez 1997, 444; Jabardo 1996): after receiving a minuscule 1 per cent of the popular vote in 1977, only in 1979 did a coalition of small extreme right-wing groups win a single seat (only to lose it definitely in the next elections). In this way, neo-fascism and the antidemocratic right were weaker than in Italy and even in Germany. As for the left, the analysis did not make precise predictions about the relative strength of the communists and socialists. The general impression existing at the time regarding the significance of the PCI (Partito Communista Italiano) and the prominence of the communists in the opposition to Franco in the workplace, universities and even among the liberal professions, meant that communist electoral support was overestimated. Similarly, it was predicted that the PCE (Partido Comunista de España) would also have to compete with some small parties on the far left, and that the anarchist labour organization, the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), as well as its political wing, the FAI (Federation Anarquista Ibérica), would be another victim of discontinuity and change.
