The short answer is abusing his royal position to fraudulently accrue a personal fortune and receive sexual favors. If rumors that he is writing his memoirs to tell his side of the story, and set the record straight of his contested legacy are true, the principal obstacle will be that he remains clueless about what he has done wrong. In reality, Juan Carlos’s conduct has not changed much over the last half a century, but what Spanish citizens expect of their leaders is now completely different. The Emeritus King isn’t accustomed to giving explanations, the Spanish media having historically treated him with kid gloves and the general population indulging rumors around his infidelities as part of his Don Juan charm.

But you’d be wrong to think it’s all sexual deviance and financial corruption. Juan Carlos is the chief architect of modern Spanish democracy, whose leadership was central to the country leaving behind its dictatorial past and becoming an active member of the European Union. While detractors claim that he had a blithe disregard for the rules and regulation of democratic law, apologists point to the fact that Spanish democracy might not even exist were it not for Juan Carlos. It remains to be seen which of the two opposing interpretations will overshadow the other in history books of the future.

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On the day Juan Carlos was born, in Rome in 1938, the exiled Spanish royal family were optimistic about returning home. The Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936 with a military coup against the democratically elected government of the Second Republic (1931-1936), was turning in favor of the Right. General Francisco Franco proved remarkably successful at convincing a broad church of conservative factions that their interests would be best protected under his command. He always gave the impression that his success would secure the return of the royal family who left Spain with the proclamation of the Second Republic.

Following his victory, however, Franco had no desire to share power. Don Juan de Borbón, Juan Carlos’s father and heir to the Spanish throne, was extremely bitter about being hoodwinked by the upstart dictator. Presenting himself as a democratic alternative, he became increasingly vocal about his criticisms of the regime following Allied victory in the Second World War. The Spanish royal family had not bothered much about democracy during the Civil War, but Don Juan played on the fact that, with Hitler and Mussolini gone, Franco was a fascist relic.

As for El Caudillo himself, he was preoccupied by the question of succession. He was not averse to a hypothetical return to the royal lineage after his own death: as long as the core values of the regime remained intact. Don Juan’s vocal criticisms of the regime therefore ruled him out as a potential successor. Used — to borrow a phrase from Spanish historian Paul Preston — as a “shuttlecock” in power games between Don Juan and Franco, Juan Carlos was removed from his family as a child and sent to Spain where he was groomed as a prospective head of state. Educated in military academies, he realized the armed forces would never forgive his father for speaking ill of Spain abroad. Juan Carlos was not particularly academic or intellectual, but he developed arguably more important skills: quick-thinking, bonhomie and a chameleon-like ability to adapt to different scenarios.

Juan Carlos’s profile both in Spain and abroad were raised when he married Princess Sofia of Greece in 1962. Their honeymoon gave them the opportunity to meet foreign diplomats, and to present themselves as representing the best candidates to steer Spain towards a peaceful transition to democracy. Franco kept his own counsel, maintaining Juan Carlos close without making his succession plans explicit. Ironically, given his love of hunting and bullfighting, Juan Carlos’s first state appointment was as the president of the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Fund in 1968. During the dictatorship, Spain never recognized Israel and maintained close socio-political ties with Arab countries. In his capacity as the Iraqi ambassador, Saddam Hussein received the Grand Cross of Isabel the Catholic Queen in recognition of his services to Spain from an ailing Franco, and a young Juan Carlos, in 1974. Juan Carlos was at least as interested in the economic and strategic importance of states as potential allies to Spain as he was in their democratic credentials, or lack thereof.

Keen not to burn any bridges, and aware of the need for dialogue if Spain wasn’t to be plunged into chaos, Juan Carlos was assiduous in meeting with Spanish politicians and opinion-makers from across the ideological spectrum in the years leading up to Franco’s death. On becoming head of state, he never tired of saying that he sought to be “King of all Spaniards” in televised and parliamentary addresses. This formulation, crucial in avoiding a return to the bitter bloodshed of the Civil War, conveniently ignored the fact that, for all his royal credentials, his institutional legitimacy derived from being a dictator’s chosen heir (and, to this day, Juan Carlos and Sofia will not allow anyone to badmouth Franco in their presence). Sofia, who speaks fondly of Franco in interviews, credits his daughter with not sabotaging the succession.

On the one hand, more influence was concentrated in the King’s hands than in any of his royal counterparts in Europe. To all intents and purposes, the remit of his role had been designed by a dictator. Conversely, he was the monarch with a most precarious position. The Spanish royal family were not as integrated into society as, say, the House of Windsor in the US. Juan Carlos walked a tightrope to mediate between Francoists with scant democratic or international credibility, who nevertheless held institutional power, and an opposition whose principal negotiating card was to imbue the transition with legitimacy. The King’s political survival being tied to non-radical democratization ensured his role is better assessed in tactical, not ethical terms. Nothing short of an expert tactician would have delivered, given the constant threat of potential saboteurs to Spain’s nascent democracy.

The Basque terrorist organization ETA had assassinated Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s Prime Minister and right-hand man, in 1973. His successor, Carlos Arias Navarro, shed tears on live television when announcing Franco’s death. Committed to keeping Francoism alive, Arias Navarro was an obstacle to democratization. In July 1976, Juan Carlos requested Arias Navarro’s resignation. He was replaced by Adolfo Suárez, an ideal ally to secure democratic evolution not revolution. Aged 43, his relative youth signalled a changing of the guard. But the fact he had been a politician and director of the state broadcaster under Franco reassured the more conservative sections of Spanish society.

When it came to the first general elections since before the Civil War in 1977, the King showed a complete lack of impartiality. Leaving nothing to chance, he wrote to the Shah of Iran and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia to request funds to support Suárez’s election campaign, playing up the then anti-monarchist Socialist Party’s Marxist credentials at a time when communism was a very clear and present danger to the status quo in the Middle East.

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Suárez won comfortably in 1977, but his popularity soon waned. With a challenging economic situation, and violence in the Basque Country, many Spaniards arrived at the conclusion that democracy wasn’t working. The 1979 general elections had the lowest turnout in recent Spanish history. Suárez narrowly defeated the Socialists who, under party leader Felipe González, then became less threatening by ditching references to Marxism from their party constitution. González and Juan Carlos had a shared interest in moving the Socialists towards the center, as well as sidelining the Communist Party as a major force on the Spanish Left. Opinion polls consistently stressed that the general public’s principal priority was stability, and avoiding another Civil War, as opposed to the installation of democracy. Juan Carlos was seen first as a guarantor of stability and, only later, of democracy. Paradoxically, his reputedly indispensable role in both respects meant that he was free of checks and balances, a hallmark of any genuinely democratic state.

Juan Carlos was, in more ways than one, a hands-on monarch. Amadeo Martínez Inglés, a retired member of the military turned amateur historical sleuth, calculates that the Emeritus King has had 4,786 lovers, peaking with 2,154 between 1976 and 1984. Amid political turmoil, Juan Carlos’s playboy lifestyle rivalled that of Julio Iglesias (who would, some years later, gift him a lion cub, named “Hey” in honour of a signature song written about the romantic crooner’s ex-wife). The Spanish public was last year captivated by newly unearthed audios and photographs that seemingly confirmed long-standing rumours of Juan Carlos’s affair with Bárbara Rey, a vedette.

A mixture of gratitude and fear protected Juan Carlos from public scrutiny for many years. The transition, both at home and abroad, has traditionally been construed as Spain’s success story, the suture of the wounds of a bitterly fratricidal conflict, which cleared the way for the country’s belated modernization and European integration. In many respects, 1981 is a more important date than 1975 as regards the democratization process. For the six years following Franco’s death, a return to dictatorship was a genuine possibility, as the armed forces threatened to derail the new form of government which had left many Spaniards skeptical of the ability of democrats to run the country.

An attempted coup took place on 23 February 1981. It involved members of the Guardia Civil entering parliament, effectively holding democracy hostage, while tanks rolled onto the streets of Madrid and Valencia. The chief agitators claimed to be acting under the orders of Juan Carlos — we will possibly never know if there is any truth to their claims. A televised address from the King to his subjects, pledging his commitment to democracy, was instrumental to the coup failing. Skeptics of Juan Carlos’s democratic credentials have always asked why it took the King so long to address the nation; the televised address only took place after the coup had descended into farce. This remained a minority view until fairly recently, with footage of the King’s address shown on Spanish state television ad nauseam over the coming years. Young Spaniards were indoctrinated with the belief that potentially lethal threat to Europeanization had been averted through the fortitude and quick thinking of Juan Carlos, who steered the country towards a stable monarchical democracy, built on the bedrock of the free market and barring memories of the past from dictating the future. His private peccadillos were viewed as trifling in comparison with such exemplary public service.

The newly monarchical Socialist government, which won a landslide victory in the 1982 general elections under the party leadership of Felipe González, was the youngest in Europe, the first time the Generation of 1968 had been in charge of a major European government. When, in 2018, I interviewed González, the longest serving President of the democratic period, he emphasized the debt he and the general public had to the King for facilitating a transfer of powers to parliament. Many would beg to differ. A less picaresque figure than Juan Carlos would perhaps have been unable to midwife the transition, variously reassuring and playing off different factions of Spanish society. The issue is that he continued to act as a rogue and a rake when circumstances no longer demanded such qualities.

Juan Carlos’s instinct for measuring and manipulating the public mood deserted him with the crash of 2008. As millions of Spaniards lost their jobs, and struggled with mortgage repayments, the King considered divorcing Sofia to marry his long-term mistress, Corinna Larsen, with whom he was photographed on a hunting expedition in Botswana in 2012: all while citizens were still feeling the financial pain. Accounts differ as to what then ensued, but what we do know is that the Spanish secret services sought to persuade the German-Danish businesswoman to end the relationship, fearing that a scandal could rock the foundations of the state. She construed this as a threat.

When Larsen ended the relationship, Juan Carlos sought to recoup the millions he had lent and laundered through his mistress. She saw things differently and did not believe that her retaining funds were dependent on an ongoing romantic attachment. The Spanish press and the population were in no mood to mollycoddle the wayward Don Juan, who was now considered to be at the center of a corrupt establishment that let the country and its citizens down. An increasing number of Spaniards began to question the “great men” accounts of the transition.

In 2014, Juan Carlos was pressured into abdicating in favor of his son, Felipe VI. Fearing a potential overturning of the legal immunity granted to living monarchs, the Emeritus King sought refuge with his old political chums in the Arab world. On his occasional returns to Spain, he has been kept at a distance by his family.

Juan Carlos’s downfall is the consequence of not only his personal and political failings, but also a social structure that exalted a man with all too human foibles as almost God-like. The result is closer to farcical soap opera than classical tragedy — anagnorisis has been in short supply. It is difficult to see Juan Carlos as anything other than a foolish old man. What remains to be seen is whether he will be written into posterity as the hero or villain of modern Spanish democracy.

There is a grain of truth in this. If the current Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wins, he will probably only be able to form a government with the backing of EH Bildu — a Basque separatist party that welcomes former terrorists from the now defunct but once dangerous ETA into its ranks. However, if the opposition People’s Party (PP) of Alberto Núñez Feijóo wins, it will need the support of Vox — a hard-Right party that attracts national conservatives and authoritarians. Some of its supporters remain in thrall to the thuggish military dictator Francisco Franco.

Bildu and Vox each claim to be devoted democrats, but most Spaniards strongly dislike both — and with good reason. Vox leader Santiago Abascal has called Sánchez’s government “the worst in 80 years”, suggesting that he prefers Franco’s violently repressive autocracy. His party hopes to repeal abortion and euthanasia laws, end measures to ensure gender equality and combat domestic violence, and re-centralise power to Madrid.

The reputation of EH Bildu leader Arnaldo Otegi is even less flattering. The ETA veteran has only semi-apologised for the group’s murder of 853 people between 1968 and 2011. Having vowed to “alleviate” the suffering of the victims’ relatives in 2021, he then humiliated them by putting forward 44 former convicts at local elections in May 2023. These included seven candidates condemned for murder or for directly assisting murder.

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While Spain’s mainstream parties would rather avoid such unseemly bedfellows, it seems they will have little choice: the People’s Party will likely win the most votes but fall short of an absolute majority. In that case, it will have no option but to turn to Vox. The party has no other potential allies: its dismissive stance on devolution and independence referenda has alienated nationalists from the Basque Country and Catalonia, who might otherwise have been sympathetic to its Christian Democrat agenda. Indeed, ever since Catalan separatists tried to secede unilaterally in 2017, the split between unionists and centralists has often dominated politics just as much as traditional Left-Right alignments.

If Feijóo’s PP and Vox fail to win a majority of seats, then Sánchez — whose party has long followed a conciliatory policy of devolution without independence — will form a minority coalition government with far-Left Sumar (a tweaked version of current coalition ally Unidas Podemos) backed by all the nationalist and separatist parties. That includes five or so deputies from EH Bildu. Nevertheless, although the polls are still too tight to call a winner, a People’s Party-Vox coalition is still the most probable outcome.

The election campaign has become all about the kingmakers. “Take the vote of Txapote!” (an infamous ETA chief currently jailed for several murders) is a favourite PP slogan targeting Sánchez’s Socialists. “Vote against the pact of hate!” shouts a massive scaffolding banner in Madrid’s famously gay Chueca district, claiming a PP-Vox coalition would shred women’s rights and fuel homophobia.

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What frantic political slogans fail to acknowledge is that whichever side wins, Spain is not about to be sucked into a whirlwind of insanely radical government. EH Bildu and Vox may make headlines, but in reality they have very little influence. Support for Vox has in fact shrunk to below 13%, from 15% in 2019 elections. EH Bildu, meanwhile, represents fewer than 1.5% of Spaniards. By comparison, the People’s Party and the Socialists are large, resilient and moderate parties — European-style Christian or Social Democrats who have run all of Spain’s governments for four decades. Some think the most logical coalition would actually be between them, creating a German-style “grand coalition”. Of course, entrenched bad blood makes that impossible, but minority allies are unlikely to force larger parties to adopt truly radical policies.

The reasons for this lie in the strength of Spain’s 1978 constitution, designed three years after Franco’s death to prevent a return to radicalism. Any significant change requires a two-third parliamentary majority, which can only be found by combining the votes of both People’s Party and the Socialists. As a result, there have only been two amendments in the last 45 years, both to please the European Union. (In comparison, France’s Fifth Republic has amended its 1958 constitution 24 times, and Germany’s Basic Law has had 62 changes since 1949.)

The constitution proved its worth in 2017, when Catalan regional leader Carles Puigdemont made his unilateral declaration of independence. The Constitutional Court proclaimed Puigdemont’s so-called referendum — which most Catalans boycotted — illegal, and the main secessionists were jailed or fled into exile. Since then, the separatist balloon has deflated. EH Bildu faces a similar problem, with support for Basque independence, which has never grown above 50%, waning in the face of a constitution that declares the “indissoluble unity” of the Spanish nation.

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Yet those on the far-Right who imagine the constitution is their friend are equally misguided. Even if Vox gets into power, it will struggle to pass many of its more radical policies. Its call to recentralise Spain’s 17 semi-autonomous regional governments would require rewriting a constitution that enshrines the “right to autonomy” of the country’s regions. Elsewhere, as the constitutional scholar Ana Carmona Contreras points out, other Vox proposals such as striking out the abortion law or banning separatist parties are similarly made impracticable under the constitution.

In the face of inevitable failure, Vox will likely devote its energy to culture warfare instead. Expect chest-thumping about Spanish history — especially the conquistadores in the Americas and other “deeds and feats of our national heroes” — as well as attempts to revive the flagging fortunes of professional bull-fighting with public money. (Its manifesto also takes a dig at “New Bauhaus” architecture, a dislike uncomfortably close to that of Adolf Hitler.) Otherwise, Vox’s influence will be reduced to encouraging a People’s Party government to uphold its economic principles: cutting taxes and shrinking the state.

In other words, Vox is destined to share the fate of far-Left party Podemos, whose role in Sánchez’s outgoing coalition shows how slight the impact of small, radical partners can be. Podemos’s headline reform to employment law, and its support for minimum wage hikes, hardly challenge the standard aims of social democracy.

The main policy mistake Podemos will be remembered for wasn’t intended to be radical. Its clumsily written 2022 rape law allowed some sex offenders to leave jail early. It was, however, a well-meant response to a horrific gang rape during the San Fermin fiestas in Pamplona in 2016 — but it left a loophole open to be exploited. “Sánchez put hundreds of monsters back on the streets,” a Vox campaign poster shouts. That may be true, but there is little radical about the law itself.

Much like Podemos, Vox will struggle to push through its radical agenda. Those watching this weekend’s election for signs of a neo-fascist revival are therefore likely to be disappointed. Unlike much of Europe, Spain’s revolutionary days are over; few European countries offer as much political stability as Spain has over the past four decades. Vox may try to whitewash Franco, but Spaniards learned much from an era of civil war and dictatorship. They won’t be going back.

Among other measures, the authors of this new “democratic memory” law, which was finally passed in September, planned to remove some of the 34,000 corpses from Spain’s biggest civil war cemetery at the controversial Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid. Hence the threat of a private prosecution alleging body-snatching, or what Americans call “corpse theft”, brought by Franco’s ultra-Catholic supporters.

The disinterring of bodies should start later this year, so no body-snatching cases have yet been brought, but Spain is shaping up for a bruising history war in 2023. Franco died in 1975, almost half a century ago. So, why bother now?

Blatant government meddling in history is more easily associated with totalitarians than democrats, but it can cut both ways. Poland’s illiberal Law and Justice party, for example, uses its Institute of National Remembrance to implement “decommunisation” laws (the last one from 2017) that purge monuments, monsters and memory from its time in the Soviet bloc.

Yet Spain remains a special case. A country that never properly confronted its dark 20th-century history is trying to play catch up. The problem is that this comes too late.

After Franco’s death in 1975, Spain tried to forget the brutality of his regime. Fear that his military henchmen would strangle the country’s new democracy in its cradle meant that Franco’s people got a free pass, formalised by a 1977 amnesty law. There were no trials or truth commissions for up to 170,000 people killed off the civil war battlefields in the Thirties, or for the victims of four decades of state repression.

A new democratic Right led by former Francoist ministers wanted a complete break and moderates on the Left agreed. “There were implicit and explicit agreements. One was that we Spaniards don’t want to look to the past,” the first elected Right-wing prime minister, José María Aznar, declared two decades later.

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Historians did their research, but schools, media and politicians stayed away. It became known as the “pact of forgetting”. If the past stank, the logic ran, why stick your nose into it?

Yet the smell lingers. Nowhere is it more fetid than in the gloomy, musty troglodyte basilica tunnelled out by Franco at the Valley of the Fallen, in the mountains 40 miles north of Madrid. This 260-metre long underground chamber is both a place of worship and home to those 34,000 war dead, whose bodies are hidden away in damp, crumbling chambers that no one can visit.

The new law wrests control of the site away from the Church, returning it to the state and formally erasing its name since this was imposed by Franco. He claimed to be honouring all the fallen of the war, but the fascistic iconography inside the basilica praises only his side. The “fallen” were stage props; the only visitable graves were Franco’s own, and that of the ideologue of the fascist Falange party that backed him, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Little surprise, then, that the valley has had its ancient, pre-Franco place-name of Cuelgamuros restored.

Since the basilica took until 1959 to build, the dead of both sides of the civil war (1936-1939) were dug up from elsewhere, sometimes to the horror of their families — who will now be able to recover and rebury them closer to home (180 of them have already requested this).

A Benedictine monastery, hidden behind a granite outcrop topped by a 150-metre high stone cross, will also be closed. That sounds like an attack on religion, but we need not be fooled by the monks. For decades after Franco’s death, they said masses in his name and lobbied for the man whose doctrine became known as “national Catholicism” to be canonised.

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On the November anniversary of his death, they would hand the basilica over to European fascists who sang their anthems and indulged in chilling, stiff-armed revelry of a kind unimaginable in any other place of worship outside of Putin’s Russia. That continued for four decades — and I occasionally went to watch —regardless of the fact that the monument belongs to the state.

Under the new law, public Francoist symbols and street names must be removed, or fines paid. The state will search for and disinter death squad victims from their often-secret graves and, in a symbolic gesture, strike out the sentences — some carried out by firing squad — which Franco’s retroactive justice imposed on elected officials of the democracy he overthrew.

Much else is also symbolic. Titles and medals awarded by Franco have been taken away. His victims will be listed and named. A DNA bank will allow relatives of those still missing to help identify the remaining corpses. Democratic memory will be taught at school — although no one knows how.

Since the Francoists are now all dead or doddery, there is little else to do. Nor is this the first attempt at dealing with the past. The 1977 amnesty was followed by a tepid “historical memory” law in 2007, which carried no sanctions, refused to name perpetrators of regime abuses and left governments to fund fieldwork, or not (Right-wing governments cut funds off when in power).

Such laws are usually passed to overcome recent trauma. When they arrive late, they risk failure. In his 2016 polemic, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, David Rieff claimed they could even make things worse: “Remembrance may be the ally of justice, but, despite the conventional wisdom of the human rights movement, it is no reliable friend to peace, whereas forgetting can and at times has played such a role.”

Rieff produces some powerful arguments, not least the way genocidal Serb nationalists in the former Yugoslavia justified their cruelty by referring to the 1453 Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. In Spain’s case, however, peace is not at risk. “Forgetting is not an option in democracy,” the law states.

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Shortly after Spain’s new law was passed, the Argentine-Spanish tech entrepreneur and investor Martin Varsavsky found himself at a Madrid dinner party arguing that Franco had been a uniformly bad thing. His was a lone voice; none of the other guests agreed. “Eleven people defending Franco against me arguing that on top of being a terrible dictatorship Franco kept Spain in the stone ages of social, political and economic development for 39 years,” Varsavsky tweeted.

Varsavsky was dining with that part of conservative Madrid society which believes a modest middle class that emerged from Francoism went on to “save” Spain from its long history of confrontation, backwardness and chaos by setting up democracy — and that the dictator should be thanked. This conveniently turns Franco’s winners and collaborationists (including, I suspect, the families of some dinner guests) into heroes.

Varsavsky may have been alone, but he was right. Franco overthrew an elected government, wrecked the economy and provoked half a million deaths. His war saw brutality on both sides, but the excuse that he saved Spain from political turmoil and a communist takeover is a lazy game of counterfactual history. Even today, few Spaniards realise that — despite a belated spurt of catch-up growth that is still presented as proof of overall brilliance — Francoism was an economic failure, pushing Spain further behind other southern European nations such as Italy (Spain’s per capita GDP, in relative terms to Italy, fell by a fifth during Franco’s years in power).

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Given that there is barely anyone left to recompense or punish, Spain’s new law is very much about the present. In what its authors undoubtedly saw as a dig against Spain’s newly successful far-Right party Vox, the law aims “to avoid the repetition of any kind of political violence or totalitarianism”. Among other things, it lures opponents into the trap of defending Franco, just because they dislike socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his coalition government with far-Left Podemos. “It is an ideologically-driven law that reopens the hatreds of the Civil War,” the leader of the moderate Right-wing People’s Party, Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, complains.

In fact, the law missed out on creating the best space for reconciliation — a national civil war museum where Spaniards could understand the horror and debate what it all meant, or still means. Spain has nothing of the kind. Civil war battle sites are either ignored or, worse still, built over.

The Valley of the Fallen, now Cuelgamuros, is the perfect place for that museum. Franco, whose own body was removed from its place of honour in the basilica by Sánchez’s government in 2018, cynically claimed he had built it to be a place of reconciliation. Fifty years later, an opportunity has been missed to make it exactly that.

Pedro Sanchez, the incumbent Socialist prime minister, is putting on a brave face and proclaiming victory. “We’ve won the election and we’re going to work for a progressive government,” he told party supporters in Madrid as results arrived on Sunday night. But his position has been corroded in a country that looks even more polarised and politically-paralysed than before. So what are the wider lessons of this latest election debacle?

1. Election gambles are high-risk in volatile political climates

Theresa May might have warned Sanchez to be wary of rolling the dice to break political deadlock after her election debacle in 2017. However, like Boris Johnson in this country, Sanchez felt he had little choice but to chance his luck at the polls. He remains the most likely candidate for prime minister. But he has failed to resolve the crisis of government in the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy after a ballot that left several losers but one big winner —  Vox, the far-right force that has more than doubled its seats in parliament to become the nation’s third-biggest party.

If you play with fire, you are liable to get burned — especially when raising the ghost of Franco by exhuming his remains and the spectre of separatism stalks a land still badly scarred by the financial crash a decade ago.

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2. Traditional two-party politics is breaking down

The Socialists topped the poll for the second time this year — but fell short of winning a workable majority. Sanchez’s party slid back three seats, leaving it 56 short of a majority in parliament, while the conservative Popular Party closed the gap after gaining 22 seats on their historic low in April. Nonetheless it still has less than half the number needed to rule on its own.

These dismal results show how traditional parties of Left and Right, which dominated Spanish politics for four decades after the restoration of democracy in the mid-seventies, are floundering as new parties rise around them. The two parties which used to routinely scoop up eight in 10 votes at elections collected less than half the total vote on Sunday. Three parties were fighting for votes on the Right and three more on the Left.

Spain is far from unique. Political duopolies are being ripped apart across Europe as traditional parties struggle to retain power. We saw this in Britain two years ago when May threw away the Tory majority, leaving her forced to bribe the Democratic Unionist Party to stay in Downing Street, and then a few months later in Germany, when the main parties suffered their worst results for almost seven decades. These historic coalitions are struggling as nationalism rises on the right, identity politics consumes much of the Left and technology exerts its disruptive power. Austerity and environmental issues are also reshaping political landscapes. In Germany, political fragmentation means 13 different coalitions govern its 16 federal states.

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3. Polarised political systems can be left paralysed

Spain’s election has simply fuelled uncertainty. Parties on the Left won 158 seats, while the Right took a combined 150 seats, leaving both significantly short of a majority. Sanchez looks the most likely prime minister but creating a functioning coalition appears harder than before. “Forming a government looked complicated in April – now it is an inscrutable hieroglyph,” was the El Pais verdict.

It may take months to sort a coalition deal, yet this is becoming commonplace in European democracies. Belgium famously went 541 days without a government after an election in June 2010. More recently, Holland and Sweden have endured months of stasis after inconclusive elections. Two elections in Israel this year failed to deliver stability. Meanwhile Britain’s election is intended to break a Brexit logjam that has stymied parliament, reflecting the divisions in the country inflamed by the 2016 referendum — although some fear it could prove as inconclusive the Spanish contest.

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4. Populism remains a powerful force

There were some hopeful suggestions recently Europe had reached peak populism after liberal lawyer Zuzana Caputova became Slovakia’s first female president, the Austrian far-right crashed after being snared in a corruption scandal, and the ultra-nationalist League in Italy, led by selfie-loving Matteo Salvini, was thrown out of government. But in recent weeks we have seen the anti-immigrant Alternative fur Deutschland chalk up some of its best results in German state elections and now this astonishing surge by Vox in Spain.

Many analysts used to argue Spain was the “European exception” —  immune to such populism since nationalist dictatorship was such a recent and painful memory in the country. But Santiago Abascal has managed to establish Vox as a significant force in Spain after winning more than 15% of the vote, ensuring a party only six years old that entered parliament for the first time in April now breathes down the neck of the PP.

Vox exploited the tensions over Catalonia with calls for a tough response, appealing to young male voters, while polling showed a rise in support when Franco’s remains were finally exhumed last month. Vox is an ultra-conservative force, defending bull-fighting while attacking political correctness, but like other populist parties, it ramps up hostility to migration as seen in its calls for a wall around Spanish enclaves in north Africa. “We have managed to open up all the prohibited debates,” said Abascal.

And just like far-right counterparts across the continent, its rise is dragging other parties on the Right away from the centre as it presents existential challenges for traditional conservatives. “Vox’s rise creates a serious dilemma for PP: facilitate a Socialist-led government, which would leave the centre-right party vulnerable to Vox‘s attacks, or going to another election with Vox on the rise,” tweeted analyst Antonio Barroso.

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5. But populists suffer when confronted by political reality

There were two big losers in Sunday’s election. Ironically, they were the two parties that sparked the country’s political crisis with their rise in 2015, which reshaped Spanish politics by challenging the long hegemony of traditional parties. But now the hard-left Podemos, much admired by Jeremy Corbyn, has fewer than half of the 71 seats it held at the start of the year while its centre-right rival, Ciudadanos, has collapsed from 57 to 10 seats, forcing its leader to quit.

They show the difficulties of sustaining a democratic insurgency, especially when based on politics of resentment. The fall of Podemos is especially fascinating, demonstrating what happens when ideological purity confronts pragmatism of everyday politics. This party emerged five-years ago from huge anti-austerity protests in a nation badly wounded by the financial meltdown and bursting of a housing bubble, which still suffers very high youth unemployment. Pablo Iglesias, its charismatic pony-tailed leader, promised to transform politics and came close to stealing the crown of Spain’s left from Sanchez. Then came infighting, fragmentation and bitter rows over compromises in local government. Now it looks significantly diminished.

Pro-business Ciudadanos could not be more different ideologically, but it also hoped to exploit the country’s discredited old politics. Instead it has been humiliated after crumbling from third place to sixth. This group began as a regional party in Catalonia, founded by anti-independence activists, then sought to capitalise on huge corruption staining the PP. Ciudadanos rose rapidly, winning one in seven voters in 2015 but has now shrunk back to be smaller than the Catalan Republican Left in parliament after a disastrous few months. First it refused to negotiate with Sanchez over a governing agreement, then foolishly tried to compete with Vox by tacking hard Right, triggering a spate of resignations from senior officials. Its leader, Albert Rivera, who once posed naked in a campaign poster, has resigned.

New politics does not take long to look like old politics.

Suggested reading

How the Left failed flyover Spain

By James Bloodworth

6. Democracy is left looking dysfunctional

In June 2015 — after the first of this recent quartet of elections — exit polls predicted Podemos had broken the mould and beaten the Socialists. Then the results came in and crushed their hopes. After this latest verdict of Spanish voters, Iglesias insisted that “the only way to stop the far-right in Spain is to have a stable government”.

He is right. Yet this concept of strong and stable government (to coin a familiar phrase) looks further off then ever in Spain after a result that leaves democracy looking dysfunctional again as it struggles to adapt to a fast-changing world. Studies have shown dwindling support in Western nations for the world’s most successful form of government as populists in various hues exploit electoral and economic dissatisfaction. Spain is just one more nation on our polarised continent struggling to find a path through these tempestuous political storms.