Comment: the Transition was grandad's dream

It's now about some striving to conserve a certain version of the past, not all sharing a vision of a better future together.

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If you ask people who lived through it, ordinary Spaniards or former politicians who are now, like Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra, in their eighties or nineties, the message you end up with is that Spain’s successful Transition to democracy in the 1970s was all about a shared better future; a common dream of peace, democracy, Europe, a market economy and modernity; a collective wish for something better for their children (and now grandchildren and great-grandchildren) after the Civil War in the 1930s and then four long decades of Francoist dictatorship. And it worked. When I turned up at the end of the 1990s, everyone just seemed to be enjoying the results of that national effort by mum and dad a generation earlier. But…