Seeing Felipe González, Joaquín Almunia, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Pedro Sánchez celebrating the 40th anniversary of that October 1982 when the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, the PSOE, won its first electoral victory, with an absolute majority of 202 deputies, it is obligatory to look back. Not out of melancholy, but rather, because of the lost opportunities left behind in the transformation of a state that was emerging from the dictatorship and that the Left could have changed in another way. Far from this, the vision of the Spanish Transition today has a perspective in which the shadows are as important as the highlights, to the extent that the resulting image is of a king who fled to the United Arab Emirates pursued judicially by numerous cases of corruption, a Spain with such a centralist vision that it is difficult to say that its regions are really autonomous communities because it sounds like an exaggeration, and a state in which political persecution is alive and well, justice has seized powers that do not belong to it and is thus competing as a factor that favours democratic instability and freedom of expression is under attack in a way that we do not see in any of the countries around us.
It is not, therefore, a balance sheet that is minimally optimistic. It is true that Spanish infrastructures were transformed, universal health care was established - the fundamental axis of the welfare state - the country entered the then-EEC and NATO, and the state was modernized in important ways. But, alongside the milestones of those years, there were also the GAL death squads, whose creation is already fully accredited to have been the direct work of the Socialist government and that the "Mr X" of that illegal operation was Felipe González; and the handling of the coup d'état of February 23rd, 1981, of which the leaders Milans del Bosch and Tejero were overthrown, but a with toll in terms of lost ambitions by the state, especially for the autonomous communities, which ended up being irreversible. The passage of time has given a different perspective to what happened during those years and feats that were then considered successes have lost much of their magic. As a picture is sometimes worth a thousand words, the photograph of the event held in Madrid on Monday, with a Felipe González looking grumpy and ill-humoured, is the exact opposite of that laughing prime minister with a reputation as a charmer.
The Socialists have ended up becoming an essential party in covering up the corruption of the '78 regime, since, far from situating themselves on the left which is supposed to belong to them, they have opted to present themselves as the Spanish party of cohesion and the standard bearers for the Bourbon monarchy. These two commitments have been perpetually present in the last 40 years and this has been the great service of the Socialist leaders to the - constitutionally speaking - indissoluble unity of Spain. They barred Catalonia's aspirations with the LOAPA law on the limits of the autonomous communities, which despite the fact that it was partly overturned by the Constitutional Court - that era was also a different one for the constitutional judges - was the first serious setback for the autonomous model. González and deputy PM Alfonso Guerra really did make café para todos* - coffee for everyone - but it was weak café americano, not espresso. Even the coffee was conspicuous by its absence.
But surely where it will be most difficult for history to be kind to the PSOE will be in how it has covered up the corruption of the monarchy, even at the cost of violating legislation to extremes that are difficult to defend, which has greatly damaged the image of Spain abroad. Rather than lifting the carpets, the Socialists have hidden everything under them that could ever be subject to an investigation. Thus they have vetoed commissions in the Spanish Parliament, as if they were the PP, Vox or Ciudadanos. And in Catalonia in 2017, they revealed themselves as complicit in the application of Article 155, alongside Mariano Rajoy, suspending Catalan autonomous government: the corollary of a Socialism that was more and more similar to the PP. An alliance that would have seemed unthinkable between those Socialists who held up raised fists and the politicians of the Spanish right, many of them recycled from the Franco dictatorship.
*Translator's note: The expression café para todos, a metaphor implying that everybody would be given the same treatment, became well-known during Spain's post-Franco transition, with reference to the debate over the treatment of the demands of the "historic nationalities" - Catalonia, Euskadi and Galicia - for greater self-government.