A few months after Francisco Franco died, magazine columnist Antonio Gala used some brutal imagery to insist that it was now time for Spain to rid itself of the old dictator’s institutions. "When a dog dies,” Gala wrote, "the rabies goes with it.” An enraged government confiscated all copies of the magazine left in news kiosks, but the officials were angered more by the metaphor than the meaning. In fact, the post-Franco government of King Juan Carlos is trying to do exactly what Gala suggested: stamp out the rabies and transform Spain from a dictatorship into a democracy. After almost forty years of authoritarianism and repression, Spain probably will have an elected, representative government before summer. The change has been planned by two unlikely reformers — King Juan Carlos, selected and trained by Franco as his successor, and Premier Adolfo Suarez, an exemplary graduate of Franco’s fascist National Movement. Despite their backgrounds, the thirty-nine-year-old king and his forty-four-year-old premier are young enough to understand the inevitability of change, though old enough to understand that change must seem slow for most Spaniards to accept it. Their relative youth also frees them from the memories and bitterness of the Spanish Civil War. Their performance so far has surprised skeptics and united many Spaniards behind them, yet success is not assured. Franco left an enormous legacy to Spain. His decades of dictatorial rule molded an authoritarian bureaucracy and a repressive police force...

On June 15, 1977, just a year and a half after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, Spaniards elected a new, bicameral Cortes with the authority to write a constitution for Spain. It was the first freely contested parliamentary election in Spain since February 15, 1936, and it produced scenes that Franco would have abhorred: Communists brazenly waving red banners, chanting slogans, and singing the Internationale; the young, dynamic leader of the Socialist Workers Party entering rallies with his left hand in a clenched fist salute, his right signaling V for victoria; politicians exhorting Basques in Euskera, Catalans in Catalan, Galicians in Gallego, all forbidden languages a few years before; and newspapers belittling their government and its leader...