Spain, more or less.

On November the 20th 1975, Generalísimo Francisco Franco died and on November the 22nd Juan Carlos I became King of Spain.

Juan Carlos had been raised under Franco's wing as a successor, and when he would inherit the Kingdom of Spain he would have had all the powers Franco had, thus being an absolute monarch with a fascist state under his command. Juan Carlos, however, had other ideas in mind.

After becoming king, he had Torcuato Álvarez de Miranda, a very respected legal scholar and one of the top dogs in the "Movement", engineer the triad of candidates for Prime Minister include Adolfo Suárez, then General Secretary of the Movement.

Suárez did not raise any suspicions at first, he was the relatively young of the party that had been ruling Spain for an inordinate amount of years, and he had been director general of the national television (Radiotelevisión Española). Suárez and Torcuato started then disassembling the state apparatus from the inside, which was no easy feat. As Torcuato Fernández Miranda would say, he staged a transition "from the law to the law through the law", which means to produce a deep reform that would change everything, but using the available legal channels.

For this transition to work, he masterminded the Francoist Cortes (pseudo-parliament, to be honest) to perform a political suicide or hara-kiri as it was quite frequently referred to. He had the Cortes, which he presided, approve a self-dissolution and have free elections.

In a very reasonable move, Suárez passed the Law for the Political Reform, legalising political parties and engineering free elections. Then came his boldest move. He had told the top brass of the military that the Communist Party would never be legalised, but betrayed them as soon as he could, legalising the Communist Party during Easter. This infuriated the military to no end.

The new parliament was the Cortes Constituyentes, and a commission was formed in order to write down a democratic constitution. The Seven Fathers of the Constitution the isolated themselves in the Parador of Gredos, in the mountains, in order to draft the project, though an earlier draft had been already written in a famous Madrid restaurant. The Seven Fathers included Manuel Fraga (head of the conservative Alianza Popular and former minister under Franco), Gregorio Peces Barba (socialist and respected constitutional scholar), representatives of the Catalan and Basque nationalists, etc. It was surprisingly inclusive, and the commission created a very moderate but decentralising text. The Constitution was approved by the Cortes in 1978, and ratified in a national referendum in December that same year. Things appeared to go swimmingly.

The military, however, was not satisfied and there was a strong "sabres' noise" for the next years. In 1980 a coup plot was thwarted in what became known as Operación Galaxia.

Among popular dissatisfaction with Adolfo Suárez's government, sabres' noise, and polls showing Suárez had one foot out of Moncloa's palace, Suárez resigned in 1981. The parliament session that would have appointed Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo as Prime Minister failed in the first try, but was gathered on February the 23rd 1981. And then all hell broke loose.

With the plenary session in place, lieutenant colonel Antonio Tejero stormed the parliament with members of the Guardia Civil, holding the government and parliament hostage. The general elements of the coup are known, but the details are still very sketchy. The captain general of Valencia, Jaime Milans del Bosch, declared the state of war in his Captain Generalcy and had the tanks roam the streets. Leonardo Torres Rojas had left his post as Captain General of the VIII Military Region and went to Madrid to take command of the Brunete Armoured Division, but was arrested by the commander. General Alfonso Armada went to Zarzuela (the king's palace) to seek the king's approval for the coup, but he received an answer from Sabino Fernández Campo (head of the King's Military House) that still resonates in Spanish popular memory: "ni está ni se le espera" (he's not here nor expected to be).

At 1 AM the King, in his military uniform of Captain General of the Armies, gave a TV speech telling the army to stand down, and that democracy would stay. This, and his down-to-earth attitude (campechanía), made Juan Carlos immensely popular as some sort of "saviour of democracy". His possible implication in the coup has never quite been clarified.