AT noon today king Juan Carlos will preside over the opening of a new legislature which promises to lay some of the last ghosts still haunting Spain from the Civil War period and Francoism. For the first time since 1934, a right wing government will peacefully take power from the Socialist Party (PSOE), having negotiated an historic agreement with Basque and Catalan nationalist parties.
You might think, then, that Spain has finally settled down to become a rather boring, middle of the road European democracy.
While words like "left" and "right" still carry an historical charge here, most Spanish politicians would privately admit that they're all centrists nowadays. Thirteen years in power have diluted most of the PSOE's socialism, and the incoming Partido Popular (PP) has no real stomach for a Thatcherist revolution. It might seem likely, therefore, that power will alternate undramatically between quite similar conservative and social democratic parties for the foreseeable future.
The only obvious flaw is the continuing intensification of violence on the streets of the Basque country, orchestrated by ETA, which the PP's deal with the moderate Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) will not necessarily defuse.
But there are less obvious indications that many Spanish citizens are less than ecstatic about the pragmatism that dominates the big parties. There is a palpable longing, reflected in cultural life and in the media, for the "great ideas" that galvanised Spanish politics in the 1930s. (The "great ideas" of the left, that is fascism is almost universally out of fashion).
The movie of the moment here, for example, is Vicente Aranda's Libertarias, an epic about a group of women, ranging from prostitutes to a nun, who fought in the anarchist units in the early days of the Civil War it has turned out to be at least a little disappointing Ken Loach covered similar territory much more incisively in Land and Liberty but the pre- publicity the film received was breathtaking.
Both of Spain's leading newspapers featured the film as the lead story in their colour supplements. In each case, they not only interviewed the leading actresses, but also surviving anarchist veterans. The latter's domed battle to build heaven on an earth here there could be neither God, nor Nation nor Boss was warmly and uncritically evoked. The appetite of the Spanish public for information about those dramatic days and utopian dreams seen is ravenous.
The extensive and affectionate media response to the recent death of the dean of Spanish philosophy, Jose Luis Aranguren, was another instance of the desire for a set of values which transcend consumerism and EU convergence criteria.
Aranguren, a heterodox Christian, built many bridges between Catholics and Marxists during the Franco period. He lost his professorship for his pains, and went into exile in the 1960s. He epitomised a scholarly, critical but gentle attitude which contrasted strongly with the "get rich quick" culture espoused by the PSOE, of which he was latterly a brilliant and popular scourge.
A further example of this nostalgia for a nobler world is the interest aroused by a new book by one of Spain's most acerbic and best loved journalists, Eduardo Haro Tecglen. The Republican Child is a loving memoir, an unabashed hymn to the democratic and egalitarian values of the Second Republic, which preceded Franco's dictatorship.
VERY few people actually question the con sensual process which enabled the heirs of Franco and the representatives of the republican tradition to hammer out an agreed democratic constitution in 1978. With the exception of the ideologues of ETA, no one wanted, or wants, another civil war. But a sense that something important has been lost in that consensus persists.
Young people generally see politics as a venal career rather than an idealistic vocation, and are more likely to join a single issue "non governmental organisation" than a political party.
In an effort to gauge the atmosphere among those who remain unrepentant republicans, I recently attended a screening by an anarchist group ofLoach's Land and Liberty. Before the film, a veteran anarchist felt it necessary to give the young people present a sort of ABC of the Civil War. This in itself would have been inconceivable 20 years ago, when every 18 year old radical could have recited the basic history off by heart.
Perhaps a degree of humdrum routine, an absence of political drama, is part of the price of a democratic and peaceful Spain. It certainly seems as if the yearning for the "great ideas" which once animated Spanish public life will remain purely theoretical, albeit widespread, for the time being.