The transition to democracy took place in the early years of his reign, making Spain no longer the only non-communist dictatorship left in Europe. The new king assumed the project of the reformist sector of Franco's political elite that, facing the conservatives, defended the need to introduce gradual changes in the fundamental laws so that the new monarchy would be accepted in Europe as a whole.
This project was the one that his first government tried to implement, and it was presided by Carlos Arias Navarro , who had already headed the last government of General Franco. This is how the Political Reform Act came about, which was approved by the Francoist Cortes and revalidated in the referendum of December According to this new fundamental law, free elections to democratically elected Cortes were to be called. On December 6, , the referendum was held and the new democratic Constitution was approved.
Thus a party that had been one of the defeated parties in the civil war of β took power. After , the democratic system was consolidated and Spain experienced a long period of political stability in which there was alternation in government between the left and the right in a peaceful manner following the dictates of the elections the PSOE governed between and and between and ; the People's Party , which emerged from the "refounding" in of the Alianza Popular , between and and between and It was decisive for the achievement of political stability that the positions of the two major parties on the most important issues were not antagonistic and that there were no major "social fractures", the latter thanks to the development of the Welfare state and "social protection" policies.
Also during those years, Spain actively participated in the transformation of the European Community , which it joined in , in the European Union and in the establishment of the common currency, the euro. However, in the last six years of the reign, Spain suffered a very hard economic crisis that led to a political crisis, which also affected the Crown and which had not been resolved when Juan Carlos I announced on June 2, , his decision to abdicate.
In the first seven years of the reign of Juan Carlos I, the transition to democracy was completed, making Spain the only non-communist dictatorship left in Europe. The Spanish transition, of which the end is usually placed in the victory of the PSOE in the October elections , is part of the third " democratizing wave " of the 20th century, which began in Portugal in with the " Carnation Revolution " and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in After Franco's death on November 20, , the Regency Council assumed interim rule.
