The Popular Party denies the Spanish democratic memory. It is not something new, nor of its supposed most radical wing. It is part of the backbone of the organization founded after the dictatorship, under the name Alianza Popular, by several Francoist ministers headed by Manuel Fraga. The successors of the Galician leader have always positioned themselves against what other conservative parties endorse as normal in the rest of Europe: the recovery of the dignity of those who were victims of the fascism that devastated the continent a century ago.
Franco’s collaborators in the 1936 coup who will lose their noble titles
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José María Aznar, Mariano Rajoy and Pablo Casado took a position, from the Government or from outside, against the Historical Memory Law approved in 2007 by the Executive of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Rajoy promised to repeal it. He didn’t do it, but although he didn’t keep that promise, he did find a subterfuge: drain her of financial resources.
During the seven and a half years that he governed, Rajoy left the law without public funds, especially one of its main advances: projects to search for the thousands of mass graves that exist in Spain and unearth and identify the mortal remains so that the relatives of the murdered know what became of them and give them burial wherever they want.
The 2018 motion of censure expelled the PP from Moncloa. Four years later, the coalition government has fulfilled one of its main promises: deepening historical memory. The new law, definitively approved this month, condemns the 1936 coup, for example. It also declares the Franco regime and its sentences illegal. Something that other European countries did decades ago, after the defeat of fascism in 1945, arrives in Spain less than fifteen years after a century of civil war.
The norm also seeks a formula to comply with international legislation and judge the most horrendous crimes produced during the fascist regime in Spain. It renames the Valley of the Fallen, in addition to legislating the exhumation and transfer of the remains of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, buried in the basilica of Cuelgamuros, as happened with those of Franco.
The list of measures is greater. But even before the Government sent the Draft Law to Congress, Pablo Casado’s PP already promised its repeal.
And now Alberto Núñez Feijóo reiterates this commitment. The PP has launched into a barrage against a norm that intends to deepen the recognition of those who were assassinated, exiled, pillaged and raped by the Francisco Franco dictatorship, as well as ending the nobility recognitions and distinctions that it granted during its four decade of existence. domination of ministers, military coup plotters or ideologues and among which are the dukedoms of Franco, Primo de Rivera or Carrero Blanco or the marquisates of Queipo de Llano and San Lorenzo de Yagüe
But not only these people were decorated. The rejection of the new law is such that the PP has even proposed in its amendments to repeal the article that eliminates the Imperial Order of the Yoke and Arrows. The highest honor granted by Franco’s dictatorship and which has Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini or Rudolph Hess among its list of winners.
Despite the attempts of elDiario.es to obtain the opinion of the PP, nobody has wanted to explain why the party registered an amendment not to repeal said distinction, kept it “alive” until the vote of the Plenary of Congress despite being rejected by the progressive majority in committee, and re-registered and defended it in the Senate.
The amendment was voted in favor in the Upper House by the PP group, with Alberto Núñez Feijóo and the rest of the party leadership at the head, by Vox and by other minor regional groups allied to the right. As the only justification, the PP claimed a “technical improvement”. After the vote, Feijóo reiterated his intention to repeal the norm.
We commit ourselves to repeal the so-called Democratic Memory Law, which violates the spirit of the Transition.
Bildu cannot be the notary who rewrites the History of Spain.https://t.co/SkzbbGMfws
– Alberto Núñez Feijoo (@NunezFeijoo) October 5, 2022
The president of the PP shared in a tweet a news item from the newspaper The reason illustrated with a photo that reads a small banner with the slogan “The cross is not touched”, in reference to the Cross of the Fallen built by enslaved republican prisoners as a monument to Francoism. Everything, despite the fact that the coalition government did not include in the norm any reference to the fact that the symbol can be destroyed.
The text of the tweet also alludes to the excuse that the PP has given for not supporting the Democratic Memory Law: the favorable vote of EH Bildu. Indeed, the five deputies and the two senators of the independence party voted in favor of the law. But their participation was not essential. In Congress, the bill passed with 173 votes in favor and 159 against, in addition to 14 abstentions. In the Upper House, the text received 128 Yes it is and 113 It is not. As a detail, the amendment 174 to maintain the Imperial Order of the Yoke and the Arrows that the PP defended settled with 148 It is not and 107 Yes it is in the Senate.
Despite the fact that the Basque coalition was not key in any of the votes, Feijóo has already renamed the rule as “anti-democratic forgetfulness law” which, according to the PP leader, has been “made at the dictation of Bildu”. An excuse that does not match reality and that does not prevent us from concluding that today, like 40 or 15 years ago, the PP still has no place for democratic memory.
