On 22 August 1979, the editorial in the newspaper El Pais entitled ‘Reform, break up and symbols’ reflected on the years following the dictatorship and the ‘peaceful and gradual’ transition to a parliamentary monarchy led by ‘politicians and professionals from the previous regime, who had acquired their skills and capabilities by being pragmatic and serving a power that had systematically denied, in theory and in practice, the rights and freedoms of constitutional democracy’.
We have paid a high ‘moral and monetary’ price for this process, since the institutional framework on which it was built can still be felt today, and it is still difficult, not to say annoying in some circles, to reclaim the right to the historic memory or to talk about the problems and the cost to the country of this transition.