Spain's government: the constitution and a regional map still in dispute

What the transition settled and what it left open

Spain governs itself under a constitution promulgated in 1978, three years after the death of the dictator who had ruled since the civil war. The document had to do three things at once and its structure follows from that.

It refounded the state as a democracy and restored the rule of law. It laid the groundwork for a welfare state in a country then in economic crisis. And it answered the territorial question by recognising "nationalities and regions" throughout Spanish territory, which met the demands of the places with nationalist movements and, at the same time, the demands of every other region for development and a share of the devolution.

That third element is the one that has kept moving. The text was agreed by consensus among national parties of the left and right together with regional parties, and the compromise it recorded was deliberately left open in places rather than settled, which is why the territorial arrangement is still argued about half a century later.

Why the monarch has duties rather than powers

Spain is a parliamentary monarchy in which the head of state has almost nothing he can decide. The drafting is the clearest evidence of the intent.

The constitution lists what the crown does using the formula "it is incumbent upon the King", and the framers deliberately avoided the words powers, faculties and competences. That choice removed any notion of monarchical prerogative from the text. Every listed function is qualified as exercised according to the constitution and the laws, or on the request of the executive, or with the authorisation of the legislature.

The list is long and the discretion is nil: sanctioning and promulgating laws, summoning and dissolving parliament, calling elections, proposing a candidate for prime minister, appointing and removing ministers, issuing decrees agreed by the cabinet, exercising supreme command of the armed forces, accrediting ambassadors, and declaring war or making peace after the Cortes have authorised it.

The crown's second function is territorial. It represents the state as a whole in relation to the autonomous communities, whose rights the monarch is constitutionally bound to respect, which makes the office a symbol of a unity the constitution otherwise distributes.

Succession runs by male-preference primogeniture: within the same degree of kinship a male precedes a female, so a daughter inherits only where she has no brothers. The heir holds the title Prince or Princess of Asturias.

How the Cortes Generales is elected

Parliament is bicameral and is called the Cortes Generales.

The government is formed by whoever holds the confidence of the Congress, which in practice means the largest party or a negotiated coalition. The prime minister's constitutional title is President of the Government.

Two features of the electoral system shape outcomes more than the formula suggests. Seats are allocated within provinces rather than nationally, and Spanish provinces vary enormously in population, so a vote in a small rural province is worth more than a vote in Madrid or Barcelona. And the same provincial allocation gives regionally concentrated parties a route into parliament that nationally dispersed small parties do not have, which is why Basque and Catalan parties have held seats continuously and why they have so often held the balance.

Minority government was the standing pattern from the transition onwards, with the largest party governing alone and negotiating support bill by bill. That was broken in 2020 by the first nationwide coalition government since the Second Republic.

The party system itself changed shape in the same period. From the early 1990s two parties held almost all the national vote between them, one on the centre-left and one on the centre-right, and a government was formed by whichever of them led. After the financial crisis and the austerity that followed, new parties emerged on both flanks and the vote fragmented, so that a majority now requires four or five agreements rather than one. Investiture votes have repeatedly failed and elections have been repeated within months of each other, which is a pattern Spain had not previously had.

The Senate has not absorbed any of that pressure. It is designated a territorial chamber but is elected largely on the same provincial basis as the Congress rather than by the autonomous communities, so it duplicates the lower house's politics instead of representing the regions to it. Reforming it has been proposed by every serious commission on the constitution and attempted by none.

What the state of autonomies created

Spain devolves to its autonomous communities the powers most federations reserve to their members, without being one. It has been ranked second globally, after Germany, on the Regional Authority Index since 1998.

The structure is 17 autonomous communities and two autonomous cities on the North African coast. Each has its own parliamentary system: a unicameral legislative assembly, a president and a council of ministers answerable to it. Health, education, social services and in several cases policing are run at that level rather than from Madrid.

The financing arrangements are not uniform. The Basque Country and Navarre collect their own taxes and remit an agreed quota to the central state, an arrangement descending from historic charters, while the other communities are funded through a common system of transfers. That asymmetry is written into the constitutional settlement rather than being an anomaly within it.

Why coffee for everyone changed the design

The original design was asymmetric on purpose. Autonomy was conceived for the territories described as historic nationalities, meaning chiefly Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia, which had claims resting on language, law and earlier statutes.

What happened instead is known in Spanish political vocabulary as coffee for everyone. Regions with no nationalist movement and no historic claim asked for the same status, obtained it, and the asymmetric federalism intended for three became a general devolution to seventeen.

The consequence is the central tension of Spanish territorial politics. The communities that sought autonomy as recognition of a distinct nationhood ended up holding roughly the same competences as communities that sought it as administrative decentralisation, which satisfied neither the first group's claim to distinctiveness nor the second group's preference for uniformity. Successive attempts to reform statutes upwards, and successive rulings limiting them, follow directly from that.

How Catalonia tested the settlement

The territorial argument reached its sharpest point over Catalonia, and the sequence is worth setting out because it is usually reported in fragments.

A revised Catalan statute of autonomy was approved by the Catalan parliament, passed by the Spanish parliament and endorsed in a Catalan referendum in 2006. It was then challenged before the Constitutional Court, which in 2010 struck down or reinterpreted a number of its provisions, including the legal effect of describing Catalonia as a nation.

The Catalan independence movement grew substantially from that point. A consultation in 2014 and a referendum in 2017 were both held after being suspended by the Constitutional Court as unconstitutional; the 2017 vote was conducted despite police action to prevent it, a declaration of independence followed and was suspended within hours, and the central government applied the constitutional article permitting it to take over the administration of a community, dissolving the Catalan parliament and calling elections.

Both accounts of what happened are internally consistent. One holds that a self-determination referendum has no basis in a constitution that vests sovereignty in the Spanish people as a whole and that the state was obliged to uphold the law. The other holds that a democratic settlement which cannot accommodate a persistent demand for a vote on its own terms has a defect that the law cannot cure. The dispute has since moved into questions of prosecution, pardon and amnesty.

How the courts fit around all of it

The judiciary is independent of both political branches and administers justice in the name of the crown.

The Supreme Court is the highest court in all matters across all Spanish territory, with one exception: constitutional questions belong to a separate Constitutional Court. That division matters in a decentralised state, because a dispute between a community and the central government about the limits of a devolved competence is a constitutional question by definition, and the Constitutional Court has therefore been the venue in which the territorial settlement is repeatedly redrawn.

The court's rulings on regional statutes have had political consequences well beyond the legal ones, and the composition of the court, which is filled through parliamentary and judicial nominations, has itself become a subject of dispute between the national parties.

What is spoken in parliament

Spanish is the official language of the state and several other languages hold co-official status within their own communities, principally Catalan, Basque and Galician, with further recognitions elsewhere.

The status of those languages inside national institutions was for decades a separate question from their status at home. A deputy could conduct the government of Catalonia in Catalan and was expected to address the national parliament in Spanish. That changed when the Congress of Deputies admitted the co-official languages to its own proceedings, with interpretation, which converted a regional right into a national one and was argued about accordingly.

Language policy remains the most direct expression of the territorial question. Education, broadcasting and public administration in the communities with their own languages are conducted substantially in them, and the balance between that and the position of Spanish is contested at every level from the classroom to the Constitutional Court.

Where Spain stands abroad

Spain joined NATO in 1982 and what is now the European Union in 1986, alongside Portugal, and it adopted the euro at its introduction. It is in the Schengen area, the OECD, the Council of Europe and the World Trade Organization.

Two territorial questions remain formally open with neighbours. Gibraltar, at the southern tip of the peninsula, has been under British sovereignty since 1713 and Spain maintains a claim to it. The two autonomous cities on the North African coast are claimed by Morocco.

The relationship with Latin America is the counterpart to Portugal's with its own former colonies, and the Ibero-American summits give Spain a standing across a continent that its economic weight alone would not.

Spanish security policy has one feature that distinguishes it inside the alliance. Spain joined NATO in 1982 and confirmed membership by referendum in 1986 on terms that kept it outside the integrated military command structure for a further decade, and the debate that produced those terms shaped a lasting public scepticism about military commitments that later governments have had to work around.

The southern frontier is the other continuous file. The two autonomous cities on the North African coast are the European Union's only land borders with Africa, and the management of that frontier, along with the maritime route to the Canary Islands, has made migration a permanent rather than an episodic subject of Spanish and European policy.