On 2 December, the former minister and current president of the Spanish Transition Foundation, Rafael Arias-Salgado, visited the Barcelona Campus of the University to give a lecture on the Transition and the Spanish Constitution to the students of the Faculty of Law. The session was organized as part of the subject on Constitutional Law, taught by Dr Montserrat Nebrera, and attended by lecturer Juan José Guardia, and was a review of the political life in Spain in the second half of the 70s and early 80s.

Arias-Salgado shared his first-hand experience and his impressions of those years of change with the students and explained how the creation of the Spanish Constitution took place. “The conditions of freedom were not 100%, but I would say they were 80%, and a referendum that the democratic opposition fully accepted. Without a doubt, the democratic opinion was not expecting it to be so successful,” the former politician said. 

The students also had the opportunity to ask him questions and share some opinions with him, for example, about the liberties of autonomous communities or the controversial Law of Democratic Memory. “The competences of the autonomous communities in Spain are greater than in some federal states, such as Germany or the United States. Further decentralization is not possible without destroying the country,” Arias-Salgado said defending the Constitution and the current organisation of communities. “History must be left to historians. Politics cannot solve the problem of historical knowledge. With this Law, one can only want to delegitimise the transition process, as an insufficient political process,” the former minister explained when asked about the Law of Democratic Memory, a hot topic at the moment.