Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain enjoyed a great splendor and a great influence in Europe and in the rest of the world. After the decline of the Spanish Empire, Spain began to increasingly keep distance from Europe as it was proclaimed neutral during the two World Wars.

In 1939, after a three-year civil war the dictatorship that was established in Spain introduced the banning of political parties and trade unions, the suppression of democratic freedoms, censorship of the media and the imposition of Catholic nationalism, and isolation from European and democratic countries.

The dictator and caudillo, Francisco Franco, established his own regime (National Movement) as a “kingdom” without a king, exiling the democratically elected Government of the Republic and also the heirs of the monarchy, Don Juan de Borbón, son of Alfonso XIII, exiled after the establishment of the Second Republic in 1931.

Franco thought his succession problem was solved when in 1969 he named the grandson of Alfonso XIII, Juan Carlos de Borbón as successor to the Chief of the National Movement

Oddly, the monarch designated was born outside of Spain, in Rome, in 1938. Son of Don Juan de Borbón y Battenberg and María de las Mercedes de Borbón y Orleans, it was not until he was ten years old that he stepped on Spanish land, after residing also in Switzerland and Portugal. Franco and his father agreed that his academic and military training should be in Spain and so he was separated from his family and supervised and monitored by the Dictator, who made him swear an oath on his National Movement.

Later on, in the70’s , while the dictator was in his last death throes he was still imposing death sentences until a few months before his death in 1975 (despite international pressure). In the Spanish society, the craving for change grew. Those who were very close to the regime thought that the new one would continue with the dictatorial monarch policy that Franco imposed.

King Juan Carlos I, the title he received when crowned in 1975, could have inherited all the power that he had been offered by the Francoist legislation, but instead, he was able to see the desire for change that people had, their longing for freedom, and he showed great intelligence and took the role of a moderator to lead Spain to democracy.

He used the current legislation of 1975 in order to introduce a set of reforms that would allow the legalization of political pluralism, freedom of choice of a representative Parliament and the formation of a democratic government, as well as the adoption of the Constitution.

In his first official visit to the United States in 1976, during a speech in flawless English, he talked about his clear intention to make Spain a normal country, open to the world and integrated into the international community.

The idea was clear, but the task was difficult. While the king was outside our borders stating his intentions, Carlos Arias Navarro, the Prime Minister appointed by Franco, did not help with these projects and openly opposed them.

During the pre-constitutional era (1975-1978) the king was very important, by the difficult political context where some people saw him as the continuation of Franco’s regime and others as a hope for democracy. He maintained a balance between the opposing forces and the legacy structures of the dictatorship. He made Carlos Arias Navarro resign and instead placed a Franco’s minister, Adolfo Suárez, who was in charge of accomplishing Juan Carlos plans. The King became, along with Adolfo Suárez, the main architect of the political reform and democratization of the country, the process best known as the ‘transition’.

In 1978 the Spaniards adopted the Spanish Constitution and established a democratic parliamentary monarchy, whose Title II, dedicated to the Crown, summarizes the prerogatives and functions of the monarch, as head of State, arbitrator and facilitator of the functioning of the institutions, as well as the Supreme Commander of the armed forces. The choice of the people was not between monarchy and democracy, but between dictatorship and democracy. Thus, if the monarchy had been the problem for Spanish democracy of 1931, in 1975 it was the solution.

The King lost all the executive power, but still would have to intervene very directly in national life. On February 23, 1981, democracy underwent another moment of crisis when a group of military and civilian guards attempted a coup d’état which failed thanks to the determined action of King Juan Carlos. If the King had encouraged the coup, with the representatives of the people abducted and held within the parliament building, it would have succeeded, but what he did was to oppos it publicly in a message televised in the early morning of February 24. At the moment the king won the respect and affection of the Spanish people, even non-royalists claiming to be Republican but “juancarlistas”.

Thanks to his know-how, Spain opened up again to the world and escaped from its isolation. Don Juan Carlos has always remembered the European vocation of Spain throughout its history and has encouraged the process of incorporation into the European communities, stressing the importance of the European Union in numerous statements. In 1977, the application for membership was filed and on 1 January 1986, the Treaty of Accession entered into force. Its importance was recognized by Europe with the Charlemagne Prize. Today, Juan Carlos I has abdicated leaving his son Felipe VI as the current king, and leaving as well a question for us. Should the monarchy end in Spain? Is it time for a republic, even though Juan Carlos has been a good king?

The current Spanish youth take democratic coexistence and our full membership in Europe for granted, but we must not forget that four decades ago there were people who made this possible. Among them is the figure of the young King Juan Carlos I, crowned in 1975, who, having been educated and appointed to be the successor of a dictatorship, had the political capacity to achieve the Spanish transition from a dictatorship to a democracy, to consolidate it in the most critical moments and get us out of the isolation of the previous regime, opening the doors of Spain to the rest of Europe and the world.