Fifty years ago on Thursday, the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, died. Whether his legacy lives on remains an open question. A recent opinion poll found that 23 per cent of Spaniards under 25 admired him, raising concerns about the country’s democratic future.
Franco had joined a far-right military rebellion against Spain’s democratic Second Republic in 1936, and was the country’s undisputed leader when the ensuing and bloody civil war finally crushed democracy in 1939. His rule ruthlessly repressed all who did not subscribe to his authoritarian, ultra-nationalist and ultra-Catholic state. And that state ensured that his legacy persisted after his death, since his leading supporters, far from being purged with the advent of democracy, remained powerful figures in forging its shape in subsequent administrations.
Long after the centre-left came to power in the 1980s, a “pact of forgetfulness” still protected those who had carried out many massacres in the civil war, and had used prison and torture to enforce the dictatorship over the next 40 years. There was no Spanish Nuremburg trial. The bodies of over 100,000 Republican war victims remain in unmarked graves – grim testimony to the impotence of the new generation of democrats.
The reforms they achieved, in terms of freedom of speech and assembly, and cultural and regional pluralism, were significant. But they lived in the shadow of a past they did not confront, until the current prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, finally removed Franco’s body from the monumental Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid, where it had been honoured until 2019.
RM Block
But Sánchez’s overdue recovery of Spain’s historical memory exposed a much more openly right-wing Spanish nationalism. This is expressed not only through rising neo-fascist parties like Vox, but among “patriotic” youth movements that see no future in European democratic values. Only historical knowledge can halt this wave of Francoist nostalgia, but that vital context is now subjected to storms of online diatribes and populist rhetoric.
