The Spanish government is preparing for a year of events to mark half a century since the death of the dictator Francisco Franco. Still, it does so with the political opposition fiercely resisting the initiative and the monarchy keeping a cautious distance.
This week, Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez opened the series of official events, under the banner Spain in Freedom, with a speech at Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum
“You don’t need to have a particular ideology, to be on the left, in the centre or on the right, to regard with enormous sadness and terror the dark years of Francoism and to fear that we might go back to that,” he said. “You just have to be a democrat.”
Franco died in bed in November 1975 having led the country for nearly four decades after his right-wing rebels defeated the left-wing Republican government in the 1936-39 civil war.
The dozens of events scheduled to mark his death include presentations, debates, concerts, study trips for schoolchildren and even a dictatorship-themed escape room.
The government says the aim of all this is to celebrate the end of a dark chapter in Spanish history and the beginning of the transition to democracy and the prosperity and development that followed.
However, the right-wing opposition was absent from Sánchez’s audience in the Reina Sofía Museum, boycotting the event because he was exploiting the anniversary for political benefit. The conservative Popular Party (PP) has cast the move as part of Sánchez’s attempts to use the legacy of Franco to reopen old wounds and sow fear among Spaniards about the contemporary threat of the right and far right to mobilise his own support. PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has compared the anniversary events to the left-wing government’s exhumation of Franco from his grand mausoleum in 2019 to rebury him in a modest cemetery.
“They can dig up Franco 100 times and they can behave as if they’re nostalgic for the confrontation between Spaniards but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us don’t want to build a future together,” he said. “They go back to the Spain of Franco but most of us are looking forward to a Spain without Sánchez.”
The far-right Vox has voiced similar misgivings. The party’s spokesman José Antonio Fúster described the upcoming commemorations as “absurd necrophilia” and he accused the government of “taking General Franco out for a walk” as a distraction whenever its political woes start piling up.
The furore has raised the question of which moment in its recent past Spain should identify as being particularly worthy of remembering. After the death of Franco, his regime remained in place before its weakness and the clamour for change led to democratic elections in 1977, with the creation of a new constitution the following year. For many Spaniards those years of upheaval, when the political left and right came together to forge a parliamentary democracy, are the real cause for celebration.
Several dozen public figures, many of them on the political right, have issued a statement criticising the government’s anniversary plans.
“We Spaniards are already reconciled,” it read. “An overwhelming majority ensured that and named that consensus the Constitution of 1978. It is the only possible and desirable date for celebration.”
Historical memory has been a big priority for Sánchez. As well as exhuming Franco, he introduced a democratic memory law which declared the Franco regime illegal and deemed publicly defending it a criminal offence. The legislation also seeks to ensure the removal of monuments and street signs, such as those bearing the names of the dictator or his generals, which are seen to glorify the dictatorship and it allows children and grandchildren of Spaniards who were forced into exile during the civil war and the dictatorship to claim Spanish citizenship.
In addition, the legislation asserts that the state is now responsible for identifying and exhuming the remains of the victims of Franco still in unmarked graves, which campaigners estimate number more than 100,000. Until now, volunteer organisations have carried out exhumations.
The government’s barrage of democracy-themed events comes on the back of a recent poll showing that more than a quarter of males aged between 18 and 26 agree that, “in some circumstances, authoritarianism can be preferable to democracy”.
The controversy surrounding the Franco anniversary has put King Felipe in an awkward position. His retired father, Juan Carlos, was a protege of Franco, but also a hero of the democratic transition. Felipe’s absence, allegedly due to “scheduling problems”, from this week’s event in the Reina Sofía Museum has caused speculation that he may feel uneasy about being seen to endorse the left-wing government’s handling of the commemorations. It is not clear how much Felipe will be involved in upcoming events.
Alberto Garzón, a former government minister for the communist-led United Left (IU), said the king had made “political calculations” about the anniversary.
“Without a doubt, he prefers to fall on the side of those who question whether there is indeed something to celebrate when it comes to the death of a dictator than on the side of those who defend the conquest of democracy,” he said.
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