On Constitutional and Parliamentary Culture in Spain and Germany: Notes from a recent book

Abstract

It is a notorious (and happy) fact that the text of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 was heavily influenced by that of the Fundamental Law of 1949. In terms of parliamentarism and in many others. Today, almost seventy years after 1949 and forty after 1978, it is time to see if convergence has continued or, on the contrary, legal systems (and legal cultures) have been moving away. As is natural, there are data that support the first thesis –especially in the heart of European integration– but also many others that advocate the latter.

The recent book by Antonio López Pina, “The eccentric intelligence”, which includes the intellectual biographies of 25 intellectuals, almost all jurists (15 Spaniards and 10 Germans), contains many interesting data for this debate and constitutes the main thread of this work , which ends by highlighting how different the solutions that the two political systems have offered, from 2016 in Spain and 2017 in Germany, to the fact that the increasing pluralization of society results in a more fragmented parliamentary representation and without homogeneous majorities: minority government in one case and grand coalition in the other.