If the climatic trend is the same as this summer's, it is likely that we will have a warm autumn, but not hot in the usual journalistic sense. For various reasons, these types of heatwaves are over. A few days ago, a friend of my generation and I were recalling the politically torrid autumns of the Transition and comparing them to the current apathy. We were twelve or thirteen years old, and everything was boiling: factories, universities, neighborhoods, the media. Nothing was certain, however; even the boiling itself was often ambiguous. Exactly half a century ago, in 1976, the dictatorship still existed, but society ignored it as much as it could. Everyone did it in their own way, obviously, but almost no one trusted the viability of that rickety artifact, which, in appearance, was already outdated. Fifty years later, this is perhaps the fundamental key to understanding that period: Franco's death had left a void that the Arias Navarro government did not know how to fill in any way. The kleptocracy remained intact, parties were still prohibited, strikes were illegal, and the police were handing out beatings right and left. Strengthened by years of clandestine struggle, the labor movement turned 1976 into a year of great labor conflict. Without wanting to idealize anything, it is true that there were massive assemblies in the factories, that neighborhood committees articulated social demands, that the university was already out of control de facto... The feeling was that society was moving faster than the government. In any case, the memory of the Vitoria massacre on March 3, with five workers dead, loomed over any protest. The so-called Platajunta, which brought together the main opposition forces, achieved unprecedented political coordination and turned social pressure into a real negotiating force. Viewed with fifty years of perspective, however, that somewhat forced unity led to the pact of forgetting. It began to take shape right then, and it contained several political time bombs that would eventually explode decades later. To confirm this with a simple brushstroke: the founder of the party that very soon may govern Spain hand in hand with Vox, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, was the Minister of the Interior on that fateful March 3...
In that climate, Suárez understood that repression was no longer useful. His strategy – progressively legalizing, negotiating with the opposition, etc. – culminated in the law of political reform, approved by referendum on December 18, 1976. Did the law dismantle Francoism "from within", as has always been said? With a half-century perspective, it is clear that what it did was to retouch it (for example, by passing directly from the Public Order Tribunal to the National Court, to give the most scandalous example).
Today mobilizations exist, but they are usually sectoral. The labor movement, which was then a backbone of political life, has lost weight in an increasingly dispersed and precarious society. And, above all, the objective is different: in 1976 people fought to expel a rotten world; today, protests are usually more of a specific tool for expressing discontent. Here is the nuance: change things and express that we don't like are two very different attitudes. In any case, there is an undeniable parallel: at both times, today and half a century ago, society perceives that political balances are very fragile and that the future is uncertain. This fragility and uncertainty have nothing to do with the era of the great majorities of Pujol, Felipe González or Aznar. There is another very relevant issue: hot autumns are no longer what they used to be because social discontent now inhabits social networks, not the streets. The main consequence of this fact is the impossibility of calibrating whether we are facing a sad bullshit amplified by the effect of intense but ephemeral viral reactions, or whether it is about real problems with staying power. Networks, in any case, are useful... to states and the powerful. The examples of Trump and Bolsonaro are indisputable, but the issue goes beyond these two characters. The second Green March, that of this summer of 2026, would have been unthinkable without the use made of it by the Moroccan government to remotely direct, according to its interests, between 60,000 and 80,000 people, according to estimates. Quite a victory, and not precisely for the poor people who have risked their lives, or even lost them, to expand a kingdom that only considers them a bargaining chip.
