The Role of the Civil Society in the Spanish Transitional Justice

The Spanish transitional justice started on November 1975, when Franco died. Then, the Francoist elites and several democratic political actors started to design the Spanish transition to democracy. Mostly historians accept that the design of the transition was made by the elites and the King Juan Carlos I is shown as one of the principal actors. In this context, the paper of the Civil Society and its influence on the transition has been underestimated. This inequality inside the historical discourse could be explained by the necessity of the strengthening of the figure of the King Juan Carlos I and his apparent democratic roots. In this paper we want to describe if the Spanish Civil Society had any kind of influence on the political shape of the transition. Also, we want to show what kind of political and legal sacrifices the Spanish democratic Civil Society had to assume. And we want to study the relation between the lack of the Civil Society participation on the Spanish transicional justice and the maintenance of the feeling (in a part of the Spanish Civil Society) that the Spanish transition did not resolve, and it did not repair all of the rights violations made by the Francoist regime. Finally, we could wonder if the lack of the participation of the Spanish Civil Society on the transition could explain the ‘low quality’ of the Spanish democracy: ¿Are there any relation between the quality of a democracy (and the success of the transitional process) and the participation of the Civil Society on the transition?