From Franco to Vox: Historical Memory and the Far Right in Spain - Notes

Abstract

Historical memory remains a significant source of political and social tension in Spain, even 85 years after the end of the Spanish Civil War and 46 years after the end of the Franco Dictatorship.
Spain is an outlier in its transition to democracy without achieving legal justice, unlike nations like Germany and Greece.
This is due to myths of reconciliation and equal accountability maintained by the ruling class, royal family, education system, judiciary, and mainstream media.
The Socialist Party has fractured “the pact of forgetting” since the 1990s, motivated by political opportunism and pressure from the far left, regional parties, and human rights organizations.
However, the Socialist Party’s ideological shortcomings and institutional constraints have prevented a full rupture.
The newly-proposed Law of Democratic Memory represents significant progress, but the Socialist Party’s limitations prevent justice and contribute to a culture of impunity.
The CARR Research Insight discusses Franco’s construction of historical memory, the positions of Spain’s main political parties, the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, the exhumation of Franco’s remains, and the Law of Democratic Memory.
It examines Vox’s position as an ultra-conservative defender of the culture and privileges of the victors, representing a unique combination of the country’s past and present contexts.

About the Author

Dr. Jason Xidias is a Lecturer in Political Science at New York University.
His research interests include Spanish, French, and British politics.
He has authored several books on key thinkers, concepts, and seminal works in Political Science.
Dr. Xidias teaches at NYU Madrid and previously taught at King’s College London and Johns Hopkins University.
He was also a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley.
Dr. Xidias completed his PhD in European Politics from King’s College London, comparing post-colonial migration and citizenship in Britain and France.

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Introduction

The territorial conflict between Madrid and autonomous regions, especially Catalonia, is considered Spain's most unresolved issue.
Ramón Arango: “Modern Spanish history is an account of unsuccessful attempts to sustain a viable nation-state.”
Historical memory, entangled with the territorial conflict, remains a major point of political and social tension 85 years after the Civil War and 46 years after the Dictatorship.
Frequent parliamentary exchanges occur between Spain’s leftist coalition (PSOE-Unidas Podemos) and the conservative Partido Popular (PP) and far-right Vox.
The article synthesizes primary and secondary sources to examine the struggle over historical memory in Spain from 1939 to the present, in which Vox is the third largest party in the Spanish parliament.
Vox represents the most vocal voice of sociological Francoism, influencing politics and social relations with ultra-Catholicism, extreme nationalism, and manipulation of historical memory.
The article analyzes Franco’s construction of historical memory from 1939-1975, scrutinizes the period between Franco’s death and the PSOE’s efforts to unravel historical memory, and examines the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, the exhumation of Franco’s remains, and the newly-proposed Law of Democratic Memory.
Finally, the paper assesses Vox’s position regarding the law and draws conclusions on the current political and social battle over historical memory in Spain.
This research builds on the contributions of Santos Juliá, Paloma Aguilar, Omar Encarnación, Katherine Hite, Paul Preston, Rubén Juste, Andrés Villena, Ángel Viñas, and others.
Katherine Hite: Historical memory is “the ways in which groups, collectivities, and nations construct and identify with particular narratives about historical periods or events.”
These narratives shape politics and social relations based on interpretation and a combination of facts and myths.
Memories are mobilized to challenge opponents in contexts involving transitions from conflict, war, and repression.
In Spain, memoria histórica refers to the Civil War (1936-9) and Dictatorship (1939-1975).
From 1975 until José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s rise to power in 2004, there was a right-left consensus known as el pacto del olvido (the pact of forgetting).
The 1977 Law of Amnesty formalized this agreement, supported by both the PSOE and PCE.
Since 2007, Spain has entered a new period of “politics of memory,” challenging the dominant narrative regarding the Civil War and Dictatorship.
Paloma Aguilar: This has been largely based on “borrowed memory of past events that the subjects have not experienced personally.”
The PSOE’s political shift on historical memory began in 1993 due to a corruption scandal (el caso Filesa) and electoral defeats.
The Socialists started branding PP leader José María Aznar as a neo-Francoist.
Other factors included pressure from domestic grassroots organizations, scrutiny from the UN and Amnesty International, and developments in Argentina, Chile, and South Africa.
Richard Wilson: Political shifts regarding historical memory are often motivated by an attempt to “manufacture bureaucratic legitimacy” or rebrand leftist parties.
Prime ministers José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Pedro Sánchez fractured the long-standing Socialist Party position under Felipe González.
Omar Encarnación: González called the 1977 Law of Amnesty “enormously positive” and hoped it would close a tragic period of Spanish history.
Spain’s democracy is more consolidated today due to EU membership, and political opportunism shapes ideological changes concerning historical memory.
Prior to the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, the United Left (Izquierda Unida) and regional parties like the Republican Left of Catalonia and the Basque National Party challenged the right’s hegemony.

Historical Memory under Franco

In July 1936, generals José Sanjurjo, Emilio Mola, and Francisco Franco staged a military coup against the democratically elected Frente Popular government.
The Francoists claimed it was a response to the assassination of José Calvo Sotelo, but Mola, Sanjurjo, Sotelo, Goicoechea, and others had been preparing the coup since 1934.
The failed military coup resulted in a brutal three-year civil war that the Francoists won in April 1939.
The Republicans’ defeat was due to Hitler and Mussolini’s aid to Franco and Britain and France’s refusal to support the Republicans.
Germany’s Condor Legion and Italian Legionary Airforce planes and troops aided Franco.
British and French prime ministers Neville Chamberlain and Léon Blum adhered to their non-intervention agreement.
This ushered in a violent dictatorship that lasted for 36 years.
Edward Malefakis: For every political assassination carried out by Mussolini, Franco executed 10,000.
Paul Preston: The Franco Dictatorship was “the Spanish Holocaust,” using savage tactics to dehumanize, persecute, terrorize, and silence the enemy.
The goal was to eradicate all traces of Republicanism and construct a new collective identity known as nacional-catolicismo (National-Catholicism).
Franco viewed the Spanish Civil War as the first stage of cleansing Spain from Republicanism.
Two main factors conditioned this “Spanish Holocaust”:
- The regime’s conviction that Spain’s internal Others were morally corrupt and responsible for Spain’s post-1898 decline.
- Franco’s use of Spain’s African colonial army against these individuals.
The Francoists transposed the colonizer-colonized hierarchy to Spain’s domestic context to dehumanize and terrorize their enemies.
Franco: “There will be no compromise, no truce … I will save Spain from Marxism at any cost.”
Franco on killing half of Spain to achieve his goal: “I repeat, I will do whatever it takes.”
General Mola: “It is necessary to spread terror, eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think like us … All those who oppose the victory of the movement to save Spain will be shot.”
Franco’s National-Catholicism consisted of a myth of national homogeneity rooted in ultra-Catholicism, ultra-nationalism, a centralized state, and the Castilian language.
This portrayed the country’s internal Others as the anti-España, manipulated and corrupted by foreign influences.
Franco called this “the international Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy (conspiración judeo-masónico-bolchevique internacional)”.
Antonio Vallejo Nágera, Head of Psychiatry of the Spanish Army, published pseudo-scientific studies between 1936 and 1939 that fortified Franco’s othering of Republicans.
Nágera claimed Republicans possessed a “red gene” that made them “mentally inferior” and justified their harsh treatment.
Nágera concluded it was necessary “to militarize schools, universities, workplaces … and all other social locations” to improve “the Spanish race.”
These studies served as a pretext for the removal of thousands of Republican children from their mothers and their transfer to “good Catholic families.”
The national narrative portrayed Franco as a messianic figure who had rescued Spain from the anti-Christ-Second Republic.
Franco’s rule was depicted as divine, exemplified by his title Caudillo de España por la Gracia de Dios (Supreme Leader of Spain by the Grace of God).
Central to Franco’s construction of historical memory was uniting diverse right factions around the myth of una cruzada (a crusade) to save Spain and Christian civilization from the left.
Framing the Civil War as such allowed him to gain the Vatican’s blessing.
On April 1, 1939, Pope Pío XII sent a telegram to Franco appreciating “this victory for Catholic Spain”.
Franco responded that the military victory was a heroic crusade against the enemies of Religion, Spain, and Christian civilization.
Alfredo González Ruibal: Catholicism was key to the regime’s ideology, justifying torture and killing as redemption.
In 1959, ultra-Catholicism was further infused into the state apparatus, ending Spain’s model of national self-sufficiency (autarquía).
Opus Dei economists from “the Navarra School” were put in power to run the economy, shaping an annual average GDP increase of about 7% until Franco’s death.
This economic and consumption boom played an important role in preventing greater agitations.
Franco exercised hegemony over historical memory by controlling the education system and the media while using the state’s security apparatuses to suppress dissent.
Building and glorifying large monuments such as the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) and Arco de la Victoria (Victory Arch) while erasing images and references to Spain’s Second Republic also played an important role.

Historical Memory From 1975-2007

Following Francisco Franco’s death, Spanish parties agreed to a pacto del olvido (pact of forgetting).
The Socialists (PSOE) and Communists (PCE) struggled against Francoism from exile, this agreement allowed for their safe return and participation in democratic elections.
For the right, the pact of forgetting meant that no one from the Francoist regime would be put on trial for political crimes.
Gema Pérez Sánchez: “State power remained completely in the hands of persons intimately involved with Francoism. Its legacy was liquidated not by outsiders but by some of the very persons entrusted with its preservation.”
Francisco Gor: “The judges who publicly expressed their Francoist ideology were few and far between, but they occupied the highest positions on the judicial ladder.”
In 1977, 93% of Spain’s parliamentarians approved the Law of Amnesty ( Ley de Amnistía), which granted immunity for all political crimes associated with the Civil War and Dictatorship.
Alianza Popular (Popular Alliance), an ultra-conservative party founded by seven former members of the Francoist regime, abstained.
Antonio Carro Martínez: “A responsible democracy cannot amnesty its own destroyers.”
The Law of Amnesty set the stage for the 1977 Ley de Reforma Política (Law of Political Reform).
Torcuato Fernández Miranda, president of the Francoist parliament, drafted the legislation.
It was the eighth and final Fundamental Law of the Realm passed by the regime between 1938 and 1977.
The justification was that Franco made a legal oath to continue the principles of the Movimiento Nacional (National Movement) and the Leyes Fundamentales del Reino (Fundamental Laws of the Regime).
Omar Encarnación: the political strategy of the 1977 Law of Amnesty, was “not to punish the old regime but to get democracy off the ground in as swift and nonconfrontational manner as possible.”
Santiago Carrillo, the leader of the Spanish Communist Party at the time: “In our country, there is but one way to reach democracy, which is to throw out anyone who promotes the memory of the Civil War.”
This was a very different scenario than what occurred in Greece and Portugal, which were also shifting from dictatorship to democracy at the time, because they put leaders of the coup on trial.
Spain had the second highest number of forced disappearances in the world after Cambodia.
King Juan Carlos I led Spain’s elite-guided transition to democracy.
Ultimately, the King opted for democracy and European Community membership while simultaneously ensuring that the key players of Francoism continued to exercise substantial power in Spain’s “new” political system.
Encarnación describes this as “a period of intense cooperation between the government and the opposition in crafting democratic institutions.”
From 1982 to 1996, under prime minister Felipe González, the position of most PSOE politicians was that “active forgetting” was essential to modernizing Spain and consolidating its democracy.
Antonio Muñoz Sánchez: the United States government and the Social Democratic Party of Germany both played an important role in shaping this position of moderation.
However, the PSOE’s posture on historical memory began to change in 1993 when it entered into a period of instability in light of the Filesa corruption scandal and other problems.
Following the Socialist Party’s loss in the 1996 general election, the issue became more relevant, though it did not really become salient until the 2000s, stigmatizing the PP for its Francoist roots.
International developments—notably the indictment of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile for crimes against humanity in 1998—also influenced this shift.
Aznar’s grandfather was a diplomat under Franco, and his father was a Falangist (Spanish fascist) official in Franco’s nationalist army during the Civil War (1936-9) and one of the key figures that managed the regime’s propaganda thereafter.
The PSOE took advantage of Aznar’s ultra-conservative political discourses and positions to label him as a neo-Francoist and increasingly position historical memory as an important part of its political platform.

The 2007 Law of Historical Memory

PSOE leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, narrowly defeated the Partido Popular in the 2004 general election and thus became prime minister. And then established the Interministerial Commission for the Study of the Situation of the Victims of the Civil War and Francoism.
Two years later, the Spanish Parliament approved a proposal submitted by IU and Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds to establish 2006 as the year of Historical Memory.
The PSOE presented the initiative as follows: “On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the proclamation of the Spanish Second Republic, 2006 is hereby declared as the Year of Historical Memory, as tribute and recognition to all the men and women who were victims of Civil War, or later on, of the repression of Franco’s dictatorship, for their defense of democratic principles and values”.
This coincided with a report published by the Council of Europe titled “Need for International Condemnation of the Franco Regime,” in which it expressed its concern for the human rights violations of the Civil War and Dictatorship.
The 2007 Law of Historical Memory, ruptured what Encarnación calls the “myth of equal culpability”: the deeply engrained idea in Spanish society that “both sides bore equal responsibility” for the Spanish Civil War.
The PP’s spokesperson, Eduardo Zaplana, along with other key members of the party, expressed strong opposition to the legislation, claiming “What we are doing is using history as a political weapon. This is a law against the democratic transition.”
The Law of Historical Memory was the product of the pressures of more than 160 grassroots organizations, the most prominent of which was the AMRH (Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory). It was also a legal response to pressures from the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The Law of Historical Memory formally condemned Francoism and granted rights to victims and their descendants for the first time.
Notably, it stipulated the right to Spanish nationality for forced exiles and their children and grandchildren (Seventh Additional Disposition); the removal of Francoist symbols from public places (Art. 15); the prohibition of political acts at the Valley of the Fallen (Art. 16); state assistance for locating forced disappearances (Arts. 11-14); financial reparations under certain conditions (Art. 5-9); and the granting of Spanish citizenship to the International Brigades (Art. 18).
Though the law was a significant step forward following three decades of “active forgetting” because it condemned the Dictatorship and paved the way for further progress, it did not overturn the Amnesty Law of 1977 and allow for prosecution.
Following its passing, prominent Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón attempted to investigate and prosecute human rights violations by the Franco regime, the spanish Supreme Court disbarred Garzón for 11 years for an unrelated charge (illegal wiretaps of the Gürtel corruption case).
As Michael Humphrey argues, this court decision was clearly aimed at removing Garzón’s judicial activism from Spain’s legal arena and closing off legal remedy for the victims of Francoism.
In 2012, the Supreme Court further impeded progress in this regard. Decision 101/2012 declared that Spanish judges cannot investigate crimes pertaining to the Civil War and Dictatorship.
It is important to note that, as of 5 November 2020, Spanish governments had only recovered the remains of 9552 disappeared persons.
As Emilio Silva, Founder of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), puts it: “While there is not justice for so many families of victims, democracy in Spain will remain incomplete.”

The Removal of Franco’s Tomb from the Valley of the Fallen

The Valley of the Fallen is Spain’s most powerful architectural symbol of National-Catholicism. The monument boasts a 150-meter cross, the tallest in the world, and its temple is larger than St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.
Franco described it as follows in an interview just after the monument’s inauguration in 1959: “El Escorial is the monument of our past grandeur, and the Valley of the Fallen is the landmark and foundation of our future.”
From 1975 until 2019, the high altar displayed the tombs of the dictator and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange (Spanish fascist party).
In the State Official Bulletin (Boletín Oficial del Estado) from 2 April 1940, Franco described the architecture of the Valley of the Fallen as follows: “The scale of our Crusade, the heroic sacrifices of our victory, and the far-reaching significance that this epic event [the Spanish Civil War] has had for the future of Spain cannot be perpetuated with the simple monuments that are often used for commemoration in towns and villages. The stones that are to be erected must have the grandeur of ancient monuments that defy time and oblivion.… The chosen location upon which the magnificent temple of our deceased will be built will be, for centuries, a place of prayer for those who fell while defending God and the Fatherland.”
Initially, Franco intended for the Valley to be exclusively for the “Nationals”; however, from the 1950s onwards, as part of his myth of having achieved reconciliation and peace, he transferred the remains of some Republicans who died in the Civil War. In most cases, this occurred without the knowledge and consent of their families.
Twenty thousand political prisoners built the Valley; and, at a time when Spain was suffering from a severe economic crisis that resulted in over 200,000 famine-related deaths, its construction cost about 6.5 million Euros.
Following a long period of inaction from the Socialist Party, the 2007 Law of Historical Memory prohibited political acts related to the Civil War and Dictatorship at the Valley of the Fallen, and finally initiated a critical debate on the symbolic significance of the monument.
More specifically, the law established that the state “would honor and rehabilitate the memory of all those who perished as a result of the Civil War and from the political repression that followed” and would “deepen knowledge of this historical period … and foster reconciliation and coexistence in society.”
Thereafter PSOE went a step further by creating the Commission of Experts for the Future of the Valley of the Fallen, recommending that Franco’s remains be transferred elsewhere.
Redefining the Valley of the Fallen, ridding it of ideological and political connotations, and addressing the moral dimension of memory, will only be possible if the monument is reserved for those who perished during the Civil War.
In 2017, the PSOE introduced parliament a non-binding proposal/consultation in parliament, with the objective was to gauge the willingness of the Congress of Deputies to reform the Law of Historical Memory.
After a successful no-confidence vote that ousted PP prime minister Mariano Rajoy in 2018, Sánchez assumed the premiership and announced that the Socialists would modify the 2007 Law of Historical Memory to remove Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen.
Following Supreme Court rejections of multiple appeals from conservative interests including the Francisco Franco Foundation and the Benedictine Community of the Abbey of Santa Cruz of the Valley of the Fallen, in 2019, the PSOE proceeded to exhume and transfer Franco’s remains to El Pardo-Mingorrubio Cemetery, about 16 kilometres from central Madrid.
Sánchez expressed the decision as follows: “The government has put an end to an anomaly in Spain, a European democracy: the exaltation of a dictator in a mausoleum constructed by the dictatorship to glorify the dictatorship.”
In relation to the earlier discussion that established a link between political opportunism and historical memory, it is essential to acknowledge that the PSOE attempted to exploit Franco’s exhumation by arranging for it to occur two and half weeks before the general election and inviting national television to cover the event.
On the right, Partido Popular leader Pablo Casado argued that the government should respect Spain’s transition (pact of forgetting) and look forward not backward.—this weak condemnation was consistent with the PP’s long-standing strategy of engaging in “the politics of memory” from the side of the victors while simultaneously being careful to disassociate itself from its Francoist DNA.
Vox’s leader Santiago Abascal was the PSOE’s most vocal critic, claiming that Franco’s exhumation was a “profanation” and that Sánchez was “going beyond trash TV with this morbid electoral show.”
These PP and Vox’s statements reflected the public opinion of their constituencies—77% of PP voters and 81% of Vox’s supporters disapproved of transferring Franco’s remains.
With regard to the PSOE, a post-electoral CIS poll (Spain’s most popular surveying agency) showed that its pre-election exploitation of the issue ultimately had little bearing on the 10 November 2019 result—94% of voters stated that it did not influence their decision.

The Law of Democratic Memory

In 2014, Pablo de Grieff, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation, and Guarantees of Non-Recurrence published a report on the deficiencies of the 2007 Law of Historical Memory stating the following: “The most serious shortcomings are to be found in the spheres of truth and justice. No State policy was ever established with respect to truth; there is no official information and no mechanisms for elucidating the truth. The current scheme for the “privatization” of exhumations, which leaves this responsibility to victims and associations, aggravates the indifference of State institutions and raises difficulties with regard to the methodology, homologation and officialization of truth. The families’ need to give their loved ones a proper burial is urgent. In the area of justice, excessive formalism and restrictive interpretations of the Amnesty Act and the principle of legality not only deny access to justice but they also impede any sort of investigation.
The Special Rapporteur emphasized Spain’s adhesion to the International Agreement of Civil and Political Rights (1977), the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment (1987), and the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Forced Disappearances (2009) while asserting the following: “The strength of democratic institutions lies not in their power to silence or ignore certain matters, especially those related to fundamental rights, but in their ability to manage them effectively, however complex and awkward they may be.”
Despite this prominent critique and constant pressure from domestic human rights associations including ARMH, powerful international NGOs such as Amnesty International, and leftist and regional parties, the Partido Popular, which was in power from 2012-8, made clear that historical memory was not a priority and consequently eliminated funding for it along with the Office for Victims of the Civil War.
As a result, it was not until after the Socialist Party returned to power in 2018, pressured by Unidos Podemos, that more progress could be achieved in this area at the national level.
In 2018, the PSOE created the General Direction for Historical Memory (Dirección General para la Memoria Histórica) and also commemorated the 80th anniversary of Republican exile.
Two years later, in 2020, following the exhumation of Franco’s remains from the Valley of the Fallen, the PSOE submitted a bill to Congress in which it proposed a Law of Democratic Memory.
Paloma Aguilar defines democratic memory as “armed conflicts that have destabilized or interrupted democracy by overthrowing legitimate, democratically-elected governments."
The party, clearly influenced by the UN report previously mentioned, stated its position as follows: “Spanish society has a debt of memory with those people who were prosecuted, incarcerated, tortured and lost their belongings and lives in defense of democracy and freedom. The memory of the victims of the coup, the Civil War, and the Dictatorship, and their acknowledgement, reparation, and dignity represent a moral duty in political life … History cannot be constructed from the oblivion and silencing of the defeated … The consolidation of our constitutional order today allows us to finally confront the truth about our past. Forgetting is not an option in a democracy."
The proposal was the product of pressures from Spanish civil society, the UN, the European Union, international NGOs, and progressive developments in Argentina, Chile, and South Africa as well as in some of Spain’s autonomous regions.
Under the newly-proposed legislation, the state would be in charge of attempting to identify the roughly 114,000 missing persons currently buried in unmarked graves throughout Spain.
The bill also establishes that the government would modify the education curriculum for students between the ages of 12-18 (ESO y Bachillerato) to promote “knowledge of Spanish democratic history and the struggle for public values and freedoms.”
In addition, the PSOE and other leftist parties have introduced a parallel bill into parliament titled Stolen Babies in the Spanish State (Proposición de Ley sobre bebés robados en el Estado español) that would centralize investigation and truth-seeking regarding the children the Franco regime took from Republican mothers and sold to Catholic families who supported the regime.

Vox and Historical Memory

Vox is the most prominent far-right party in Spain today and the third most representative force in parliament with 52 seats (out of a total of 350) in the Congress of Deputies.
In contrast to some other European contexts such as France, Vox was not an extremist party that entered from the margins, but rather, it emerged from the very womb of the Partido Popular (whose forebearer, Alianza Popular, was founded by seven prominent ministers of the Franco regime).
Thus, whereas the right can be understood as the child of Francoism, the far right can be understood as its neo-Francoist grandchild.
Thus president Santiago Abascal and other party leaders portray Vox as the true defenders of democracy.
Vox’s 100-point political program includes a section titled España, Unidad y Soberanía (Spain, Unity and Sovereignty) in which it states its official position regarding the Law of Historical Memory: “No parliament should have the power to define our past, and much less exclude Spaniards that have different viewpoints. The past cannot be used to divide us.”
This statement is grounded in the political myth that the democratically-elected Popular Front government of 1936 was responsible for the Spanish Civil War and that the Dictatorship and the Law of Amnesty achieved reconciliation and peace between all Spaniards.
With respect to the newly-proposed Law of Democratic Memory, Macarena Olona, Secretary General of Vox in the Congress of Deputies has called the law “totalitarian” and has promised to appeal it to the Constitutional Court upon its enactment.
Abascal recently criticized the current government, claiming that “They do not only want to profane General Franco’s tomb, but they also want to … tear down the [150-meter] cross at the Valley of the Fallen … They want to rewind history to win the Civil War and implant an anti-Spanish Communist Republic.”
The notion of “an assault against the crucifix” evokes Spain’s first Reconquista against the Muslim Other and the second, as politically constructed by Franco, against the so-called “godless Popular Front.”
For Vox, all of these elements together with the current leftist governing coalition constitute the illegitimate anti-Spain.

Conclusions

Academic literature suggests that the more violent a regime is, the greater the attempt will be to seek justice thereafter.
As Golob argues, “The moment of transition is the golden opportunity to forge a new, democratic social contract, and the new democratic future envisaged by that contract will be possible, and will last, only by using the law to confront and overcome the repressive and abusive past.”
Spain is an outlier. As previously documented, until the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, very little progress was achieved in terms of social justice related to the Spanish Civil War and Franco period.
Some scholars have argued that this delay of truth-seeking allowed for just enough stability to ensure that Spain would not regress to authoritarian rule, or even worse to another civil war.
As Santos Juliá puts it, “The Spanish transition was a unique case of national reconciliation without legal justice.”
Politicians on both sides of the political spectrum, the royal family, the education system, and the mainstream media have sustained the idea of “needing to move on” and “the myth of equal accountability.”
Between 1940 and 1958, the Franco regime carried out a comprehensive nationwide search into the forced disappearances of his supporters known as the Causa General (General Cause).
Since the 1990s, the PSOE, pressured by the far left, regional parties, and human rights organizations domestically and internationally, has altered its position on historical memory.
That is, confronting the traumatic past through human rights legislation.
The strong interplay between domestic and international pressures has shaped important progress.
The Partido Popular has been steadfast. As Manuel Fraga put it at the time the left proposed the Law of Historical Memory: “It irritates me that today there are irresponsible people who fuel the Civil War. It is dangerous digging up the ghosts of the past by promoting the vindication of historical memory. This is a violent attempt to settle the score.”
The 2020 Democratic Memory bill, while still inadequate in the eyes of the UN, Amnesty International, and a wide array of other international and domestic human rights organizations, makes further progress in confronting Spain’s Civil War and dictatorship. It provides a much larger budget (11.3 million Euros) for historical memory (in particular exhumations) and stipulates the central government’s responsibility in coordinating this with local authorities; nullifies the sentences issued by the Franco regime against Republicans; establishes fines for damaging mass graves and other places of historical memory; paves the way for the illegalization of the Francisco Franco Foundation and seizure of its more than 30,000 archives pertaining to the Civil War and Dictatorship.
As Vicenç Navarro points out, “the history that is taught in public [state] schools [and even more so in religious private and charter schools] ignores the progress made by the Second Republic in relation to the previous monarchical system … from the agrarian reforms to the enormous expansion of the education system, both resisted by the Catholic Church.
While the newly-proposed Law of Democratic Memory is the most comprehensive initiative to date that confronts Spain’s repressive and violent past, and is a significant advancement in comparison to the 2007 law, as UN and Amnesty International reports point out, it remains inadequate because there is a lack of political will within the PSOE to attempt to overturn the Law of Amnesty of 1977 in order to prosecute the human rights violations of the Civil War and Dictatorship. Casado has stated that “During the transition, there was no concealment, no subordination, no fear, just moral greatness and a sense of history, reconciliation, and agreement … We don’t need the sectarian rewriting of history that fuels resentment in Spanish society."
On the other side of the political spectrum, two fundamental factors largely explain the PSOE’s commitment to advancing democratic memory while stopping short of attempting to prosecute the human rights violations of the past: one is that it seeks to maximize votes on the left amongst those for which the issue matters but fears the political backlash that a more aggressive approach would provoke; the other is that the Socialist Party is part of what is often referred to in Spain as the régimen del 78 (regime of '78), which, as previously mentioned, contributed to institutionalizing the myths of reconciliation and equal responsibility.
As Rubén Juste and Andrés Villena have documented, the PSOE seeking to advance historical memory without shaking the existing political, economic, legal, and media structures—the establishment—too much.
Until the PSOE is willing to open up Pandora’s box by challenging the Law of Amnesty, in line with the conclusions of UN and Amnesty International reports, Spain will remain only a partial democratic success story.
There is a need for an independent mechanism, such as a Truth Commission, that elucidates the Civil War and Dictatorship. Furthermore, future initiatives should make clear that no amnesty can prevent justice.
A key component of this is overturning the Law of Official Secrets of 1968, which continues to conceal important details regarding the horrors of the regime. The absence of this contributes to perpetuating a culture of impunity, which remains one of the fundamental problems of Spanish politics today.