|Franco at Bilbao, 1939 (NYPL)|
The political transition during the 1970s that allowed the continuity of Francoist institutions and legal behaviours beyond the transition to democracy also partially explains the Spanish anomaly in the Western European context. The legislator and the drafters of the Constitution decided not to completely erase the precedent Francoist law. They also opted for silence: no condemnations of the dictatorship and no references to the anti-Francoist opposition or the victims of Francoism are to be found. The consequence was what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls a ‘palimpsest of legal cultures’: the lack of regulation led to the creation of a legal culture combining elements of the old Francoist system and the new democratic one.