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Spain has had a constitutional monarchy since 1975. Spain has both a king and a prime minister as well. The king is Juan Carlos I, while the Prime Minister is Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.King Juan Carlos I, who became the head of state after Francisco Franco's death, has the ability to ratify laws, dissolve the legislature, and propose candidates for the office of prime minister; he is also head of the armed forces. The executive branch consists of a Council of Ministers presided over by the President of Government, proposed by the monarch and elected by the National Assembly following legislative elections. The legislative branch is made up of the Congress of Deputies with 350 members, elected by popular vote on block lists by proportional representation to serve four-year terms, and a Senate with 259 seats of which 208 are directly elected by popular vote and the other 51 appointed by the regional legislatures to also serve four-year terms. Spain is regarded as the most decentralized State in Europe at the present moment, with all of its different territories managing locally their Health and Education systems and with some other territories even managing their own public finances without hardly any presence of the Spanish central government in this regard or, in the case of Catalonia and the Basque Country, equipped with their own, fully operative and completely autonomous, police corps which widely replaces the State police functions in these territories.
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