ABSTRACT
The death of General Francisco Franco on 20 november 1975 ushered in a period of uncertainty in Spanish politics. Over the previous decade, Franco had groomed Juan Carlos de Borbón – grandson of the monarch deposed by the Second Republic in April 1931 – to succeed him as head of state. Fears that Franco’s ‘heir’ would extend the authoritarian rule that had followed the Civil War (1936–1939) were allayed when, in early 1976, the recently crowned King Juan Carlos I ordered the creation of a government to oversee the establishment of parliamentary democracy. This early period of the current constitutional monarchy, up to the overwhelming success of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) in the 1982 general elections, soon came to be known as the ‘Transition’.
