“Mr. Weber, is this also your plan for Germany? To put the name of the leader of the Third Reich back on the streets and squares of Berlin?” The question was directed to Manfred Weber, a center-right German politician who heads the largest group in parliament. Mr Sánchez, the centre-left leader, was re-elected to Spain’s parliament last month, shortly after he was re-elected to the EU parliament in Strasbourg, France, following a closely contested general election that brought far-right forces closer to winning power for the first time since Mr Franco’s death. He was speaking to members of Congress.
During a heated debate in the European Parliament, Mr Weber of the Christian Democrats strongly criticized Mr Sánchez for negotiating support from Catalonia’s pro-independence parties to remain prime minister. Mr. Sánchez’s Socialist Party proposed an amnesty law for those who took part in Catalonia’s failed 2017 independence movement in exchange for votes in parliament. Mr Weber accused Mr Sanchez of abandoning the option of reaching an agreement with the right-wing Partido Popular (PP) instead. ).
In fact, the Conservative Party PP won the largest share of votes in the July 2023 general election, but was unable to reach a parliamentary majority even with the support of the far-right party Vox. These agreements between the two parties were widely disseminated after local and regional elections across Spain last May, in which the PP won significant seats but often failed to win an absolute majority. In these cases, the Boxes voted in favor of PP candidates after reaching agreements that included the place of this Spanish nationalist force from time to time within various regional and local governments.
This prompted Mr. Sánchez to brief EU parliamentarians on the policies implemented by these right-wing coalitions. Is Sanchez aware that governments that rely on Vox’s support are renaming streets after key figures in the Franco dictatorship, which ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975? I asked Mr. Weber. It was in this context that Mr. Sanchez asked Mr. Weber if he was comfortable. A figure of the Third Reich is commemorated with the name of a street in his country.
The PP’s predecessor party, Alianza Popular, was itself founded after the dictator’s death by Manuel Fraga, who served as a minister in several Francoist regimes. The traditional argument of right-wing parties is that the legacy of the dictatorship was overcome with the first democratic elections in 1977 and the approval of the current constitution in 1978, a form of national reconciliation. Vox is less circumspect about its views on the Francoist past. Although it does not openly defend Franco’s dictatorship, Francoist flags are often seen at party rallies. What is even more revealing are the words of Vox leader Santiago Abascal in September 2020. He said the broad-left government, led by the socialist party Sánchez in coalition with the left-wing Unidas Podemos, was “the worst Spanish government in 80 years”. This was before the establishment of the Franco regime.
Mathilde Eiroa San Francisco, a history professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, told me that the difference between the PP and Vox on Francoism is a matter of nuance rather than substance. She argues that both parties understand Spain’s first democratic period, the Second Republic (1931-1936), and the subsequent Civil War (1936-39), based on their own historical biases. He explains.
They essentially claim that the left is responsible for all the negative and violent periods in Spain’s modern history. This vision has long served as a legitimation for Francoism and was propagated by the regime itself. Both PP and Vox also recognize that research and discussion of the dictatorship era “sends a bad light on important social groups that are the origins of the current political right and far right,” said Eiroa San Francisco. added.
Spain’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s was based on the agreed-upon fiction that Spanish history would begin anew after Franco’s death. Those who benefited from Francoism were content to wash away their undemocratic past, but those who suffered through dictatorship and exile were too conscious of the fragility of the new democracy to demand a complete break with the past. There wasn’t.
This collective silence, better known as the “Pacto del Olvido” (Pact of Forgetting), was institutionalized in the 1977 Amnesty Law. The decision to guarantee legal immunity for those responsible for regime crimes opened the door to the consolidation of a new democratic order. But the price to pay was very high for the victims of Francoist forces during the Civil War and dictatorship, who never saw their oppressors explain their crimes in court.
The power of the Olvid Pact was made clear when the Socialist Party, led by Felipe González, won the 1982 elections and returned to national politics for the first time in more than 40 years. The last Socialist prime minister, Juan Negrín, died in exile after fleeing Francoist forces, but González, who remained in power until 1996, left his past untouched. Spain’s first attempts to deal with the civil war and Francoist era began in 2004, when Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero came to power after two successive PP governments.
Despite the opposition of the PP, in 2007 the Spanish Congress declared the political trials carried out by the pro-Franco court illegal and ordered the removal of symbols and street names associated with the regime’s Rei de Memoria. – Passed Historica (Historical Memory Act). It also provides for the state to provide funding to excavate mass graves where tens of thousands of Republicans were buried without proper graves and without the knowledge of their families during and after the Civil War.
Very limited progress on the historical memory law was halted after PP party leader Mariano Rajoy became prime minister in 2011. During his seven years in power, Rajoy’s government did not repeal the Historical Memory Act, but it did deplete public funding. In the end it had a similar effect. Government funds were earmarked for mass grave excavations, exhibitions, documentaries, and conferences. These activities were barely able to survive thanks to international awards and private donations.
After the Socialist Party returned to the national government in 2018, the new cabinet led by Sanchez proceeded to exhume Franco’s remains from the Valley of the Fallen. It is best known as the Francoist Victory Monument on the outskirts of Madrid, where more than 30,000 republicans were buried without proper graves and without their families knowing.
In 2022, the broad-left government led by Sánchez approved the Ley de Memoria Democratica (Democratic Memory Law), which was a further step forward compared to the 2007 measure. Under the new law, the state is responsible for identifying Republicans buried in mass graves and giving them proper burials. The new law also recognizes a wider range of victims of the 1936-1939 conflict and dictatorship. Both PP and Vox opposed the bill.
Still, the laws of democratic memory themselves have significant limitations. The main problem, largely due to his 1977 amnesty law, is that it remains extremely difficult to bring those responsible for Franco-era crimes to justice. It is also important to consider that, due to Spain’s relatively decentralized political system, different local governments play a major role in the application of historical memory laws. This gave regional parliaments in Catalonia and the Basque Country, which have been the special targets of Francoist repression, the freedom to approve particularly ambitious legislation.
However, in the political situation following the right-wing breakthrough in the May 2023 local elections, the enormous power of local councils regarding historical memory policy has a completely different impact. In regions such as Aragon and Extremadura, the PP and Vox formed coalition governments. In other regions, such as Cantabria and the Balearic Islands, the parties agreed for the PP to rule alone, provided it implements some of the policies championed by the far right. In these regions, where Vox plays a decisive role, the far right has consistently advocated that any measures set out by the Democratic Memory Act should not be implemented, and that local laws built on older historical memory laws should not be implemented. He demanded that it be deleted.
The events in the Balearic Islands are typical of the far-right’s ability to reshape historical memory, even from outside the highest ranks. Before the May 2023 local elections, the Socialist Party held the presidency here for about eight years in two different coalitions with left-wing parties. In contrast to what happened at the national level and in many local councils, the Balearic Islands PP voted in favor of a regional historical memory law in 2018. However, as a result of a political agreement between right-wing parties, the PP announced that upon assuming the presidency of the Balearic Islands in summer 2023, it would repeal the regional parliament’s 2018 historical memory law.
María Antonia Oliver Paris, president of the Mallorca Memory Society, told me that her society is kept secret by the Balearic Islands’ current PP government. Continuing the program inherited from the previous government, it is opening mass graves and identifying victims of Francoist repression during the Civil War and its aftermath. However, it was delayed and carried out in secret.
This is in contrast to the previous government’s policies, which she believed were successful thanks to constant communication between local governments and civil society organizations defending historical memory. She states that “memory is public, part of society, and needs to be disseminated and promoted.” Instead, under the current government, “victims of Francoism and their relatives are being used as bargaining chips” to appease the far right.
The situation in the Balearic Islands after the May 2023 vote remains paradoxical, as in many other regions and cities where the PP is in power and Vox plays a key role. The Democratic Memory Act, approved in 2022, is the most ambitious national law to date to address nearly four decades of Francoist repression, although it is limited in important respects. Nevertheless, as historian Eiroa San Francisco has pointed out, the laws of democratic memory can “come to nothing in areas where the People’s Party and Vox participate in government.”
If Spain’s recent history has shown us anything, it’s that progress toward social rights and healthier conversations about its Francoist past is never permanent. As long as large segments of Spanish society insist that the past be left alone, any effort to shine a light on the dictatorship will always be at risk of being overturned.