In Spain, the response to the death of Pope Francis has reflected how the country’s political left found common cause with him on a range of issues, a dynamic that often riled the Catholic right.
The number of Spaniards who see themselves as practising Catholics has dropped to fewer than one in five and is now surpassed by atheists and agnostics. Yet the country’s church remains a powerful institution, with five cardinals eligible to take part in the upcoming conclave.
Spain’s left has often had an uncomfortable, or even antagonistic, relationship with the church. In the 20th century that was most visible during the Second Republic, the ensuing 1936-39 civil war and the dictatorship that followed under Francisco Franco, whose National-Catholicism ideology the church endorsed. But there have also been tensions more recently, such as when Spanish bishops took to the streets to protest against the Socialist government’s same-sex marriage law in 2005.
However, the current Socialist-led coalition has been effusive in its praise of Pope Francis in the wake of his death, celebrating what it sees as a shared passion for social justice and reform. Prime minister Pedro Sánchez spoke of his “deep legacy”, while justice minister Félix Bolaños praised “a good man and a great pope”.
“He was a pope who stood out for his fight against inequality, injustices, his fight against climate change and his concern for all those on the margins,” Bolaños, of the centre-left Socialist Party, said. “That is why the Spanish government has felt so close to his work and his values.”
Similar sentiments have been expressed by many farther to the left who have seen common ground in many of Pope Francis’s opinions, including in the international sphere.
Pablo Fernández of the far-left Podemos said the late pope had “raised his voice against inequality, in support of the most vulnerable, in defence of migrants; he also denounced genocide in Gaza and criticised the Trump government for its migration policies”.
But beyond an apparent ideological affinity, there were also personal ties between the pope and the Sánchez government, which the political right tends to view as the most radical of Spain’s modern era. The prime minister, who has described himself as an atheist, visited Pope Francis in the Vatican twice, most recently in October 2024. One of his deputy prime ministers, Yolanda Díaz, who comes from a far-left background, also had two audiences with him.
As they ended their meeting in February of 2024, the pope told Díaz, who has been a staunch defender of workers’ rights, to “keep going, be firm”,? in a comment that unsettled some on the right.
However, Jordi Évole, a journalist who interviewed Pope Francis several times at length for television programmes and a documentary, insists that efforts to cast the late pope as a radical are mistaken.
“The pope didn’t move his compass needle,” he said. “What has moved has been the world’s compass, which is increasingly moving towards the far right. That’s the only reason the pope ended up looking radical.”
Spain’s right and far right both have deep Catholic roots but their response to the pope’s death was noticeably muted compared with that of the left.
“We join the prayers of millions of Catholics for the soul of Pope Francis,” wrote Santiago Abascal, leader of the far-right Vox party, on social media. Abascal’s party colleagues were similarly terse, avoiding mention of the legacy of the late pope and instead focusing on wishing for the best possible successor to him.
Vox was a frequent critic of Pope Francis in his lifetime, for example issuing acid retorts to his calls for tolerance for migrants or a basic universal income. Vox MEP Hermann Tertsch once described him as someone who was “squatting” in the Vatican.
The main opposition conservative People’s Party has been marginally more expansive in its tributes, although its own habit of drifting into anti-immigrant rhetoric and climate change denial has made it difficult for it to applaud the content of Francis’s papacy since his death. Instead, PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo took what looked like a purposefully bland approach, pointing out that the pontiff had been a Spanish speaker and that he “served the world and the church from his convictions and thinking until the very last moment”.
Pope Francis’s suggestion in 2021 that the Spanish church should consider a gesture that would “close wounds” caused by the conquest of America five centuries earlier gave many on the nationalist right another reason to view him with suspicion and fed into the country’s increasingly fierce culture wars.
Meanwhile, in 2019, despite opposition from the political right, the Vatican raised no objections to the government’s exhumation of Franco’s remains from the Valley of the Fallen, his vast mausoleum and a symbol not just of his regime but of the church’s collusion with it.
More recently, Spanish government-Vatican negotiations have led to an agreement over the “re-signifying” of the site. The accord means that a community of Benedictine monks can remain there, but a museum will be built explaining the Valley of the Fallen’s sinister backstory. The mausoleum’s fate underlines the unlikely harmony of recent years between the Spanish left and the Vatican.
