Aaron wrote:Spain is a monarchy?
Yes.
Basically the story goes like this :
In the 30's came the
Second Republic. It was governed by Socialists and Communists, and followed the same kind of politic as the French "Front Populaire" (paid vacations, improvement of worker's rights, creation/improvement of the social safety net, etc..).
In 1936, the Fascists launched a Coup. The
Spanish Civil War had begun and with the help of Hitler the Fascists finally took total control of the country in 1939.
From then one
Franco's Dictatorship ruled the country until 1975. It ended shortly after the death of that son of a bitch, when the current King,
Juan Carlos de Borbon (of the same family as Louis XIV & Cie), to whom the fascist had given transition powers, used said absolute powers to launch the country on the path of reform toward Democracy.
Since then the country is a "
Unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy" (to use Wikipedia's formula).
Juan Carlos : I respect the man for having ended the Dictatorship, but as things stand his current legitimacy he hold it from the Fascists - Fascists which themselves toppled through illegitimate means the legitimate Republican regime at the time. Given the story of my family [1] I cannot then morally support the Spanish Monarchy.
[1] : Half my family is Spanish through my dad's side, my Grandpa and Grandma had to exil themselves in Dakar (Senegal) in order to live peacefully, because they were Republican. My Grandma's dad, a Communist deputy at the national parliament of the time, was him executed through a firing squad in the early hours of the Civil War because he fought during all his political career for the right of workers to live in decent conditions, his remains thrown into a well somewhere (to this day we still don't know where exactly AFAIK), to be forgotten forever.