Report attitudes towards collective memory of resistance against far-right regimes, groups or practices and specific narratives in collective memory in the target countries
AGNES ROSELL, NOVACT
NURIA MILLAN INIESTA, NOVACT
Introduction: Second Republic, Civil War, Francoism and Transition to democracy
Spain’s right-wing position on historical memory can’t be understood without the events that took place in this territory from 1931 until 1978 and the years that followed. On the 14th of April 1931 the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed after the Spanish people had chosen it democratically, ousting the existing monarchy headed by Alfonso XIII. This democratic period remained generally peaceful for 5 years and 3 months, until Franco orchestrated the Coup d’État on the 17th of July of 1936 in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco and on the 18th of July of 1936 in the Peninsula.
The Second Republic finished establishing its foundation with the adoption of its Constitution on the 9th of December of 1931, process led by the provisional government. From 1931 to 1933, this democratic period was governed by the socialist-republican coalition. Afterwards, from 1933 until 1935, it was governed by the right-wing Radical Republican Party with the support of the catholic conservative party Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA). In its last five months before the Civil War, it was governed by the left-wing party Frente Popular. During the second biennium of the Republic an important event took place: the October Revolution of 1934, which was a general strike against the right-wing government at that time, supported by the General Union Workers (UGT) and Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), which was especially powerful in Catalonia and Asturias.
With the Coup d’État, General Franco appointed himself, unilaterally, as head of the State. He did find resistance on the Republican side, which led to one of the darkest periods of Spanish history: the Civil War. This internal conflict, supported by the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, lasted for more than three years, until March of 1939, and resulted in the defeat of the republican resistance and the official establishment of the Francoist authoritarian regime.
Francoism was an authoritarian, nationalist, catholic, conservative, militarist, anti communist, single-party regime that governed Spain for almost 40 years. The repression against the republican and anti-franco resistance was huge: extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detentions, disappeared people, tortured people, stolen babies, forced labour, etc. These excesses were answered with a big clandestine anti-Francoism resistance during the 60s and the 70s. It is important to underline the repression suffered by the LGTBQ+ community, Sinti and Roma, republican women, Jews, Masons and Communists. Firstly, LGTBQ+ people were repressed by the adoption of the Ley de Vagos y Malenate (Vagrancy Act) (1933) and the Ley 16/1970, de 4 de agosto, sobre Peligrosidad y Rehabilitación Social (Law 16/1970, 4th August, on danger and Social Rehabilitation), which prosecuted and stigmatised the community to the point of sentencing them to forced internment. Secondly, Sinti and Roma were heavily stigmatized: they were abused and imprisoned; they were considered to be disease carriers, which lead to the adoption of some measures to counteract their “danger”; itinerant trade was prohibited, etc. In third place, many women were repressed, apart because of their political beliefs, because of their gender . For instance, women were detained and raped for committing the “consort offence”, that is to say, to be a relative of men opposed to the regime. In fourth place, Franco’s regime decided to actively ignore the Jewish genocide happening in Germany under Hitler’s dictatorship, even if nowadays there is the general belief that Franco was the saviour of many people from this last community. Finally, Masons and Communist were also two targeted groups by Franco by adopting the Ley sobre la Represión de la Masonería y el Comunismo (Law on Repression of the Masonry and Communism) (1940), which, just for starters, prohibited membership to this communities and dissolved the organisations that had these ideologies.
Franco died on 20th November 1975, which led to the Spanish Transition to democracy. Franco tied the continuity of the essence of his regime 6 years before his death by proclaiming Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón as his heir as Head of State with the title of King(1969), following the procedure that he and his ministers established in the Ley de Sucesión de la Jefatura del Estado (1947) (from now on, Law of Succession of the Head of State). On the 22d of November of 1975, two days after Franco’s death, Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón was proclaimed King of Spain after taking oath to the Fundamental Francoist Laws and loyalty to the structural principles of the Nacional Movement, as article nine of the Law of Succession of the Head of State required. This fact marked the main characteristic of the begging of the Spanish democratic transition: democracy grew on the grounds that the dictatorship had built, and not as a result of its defeat.
From 1975 until 1978 multiple laws were passed in order to leave the dictatorship behind and build a democracy, which culminated with the adoption of the current Spanish Constitution in 1978. Two of the most important ones were the Ley 1/1977, de 4 de enero, para la Reforma Política (Law 1/1977, of January 4, for Political Reform) and the Ley 46/1977, de 15 de octubre, de Amnistía (Law 46/1977, of October 15, on Amnesty, from now on, Amnesty Act). The first one allowed the elimination of the Francoist dictatorship structure from a juridic point of view, allowing the celebration of democratic elections, which took place on the 15th of July 1977. The second one, also known as Pacto del Olvido (from now on, Pact of Forgetting), is key to understanding Spain nowadays and its relationship with its historical memory. The Amnesty Act, which is still an existing rule, whose main objective was to eliminate some legal effects that could jeopardize the consolidation of the new regime, was one of Franco’s opponents’ biggest claims, but once passed, it showed its two faces. On the one hand, this law established amnesty for political prisoners sentenced before 1976. On the other, it granted amnesty to the authorities, officials and law enforcement officers who had committed crimes. This last fact means that, still nowadays, no one from the dictator’s side has been judged in Spain for the atrocities committed during the Civil War and the Dictatorship.
The approval of these laws resulted, among others, in the reform of multiple Francoist structures. Nevertheless, some of them did not experience structural changes and maintained some dictatorial traces. It is relevant for this paper, the changes that political parties and the judiciary system did (or did not) suffer. On the one hand, the most popular right-wing party in Spain nowadays, Partido Popular (PP), which governed the State for decades, is the direct heir of Francoism. One of the first steps of the transition was the legalization of political parties, ensuring the political pluralism that lacked for almost 40 years, which resulted in the foundation of the right-wing party Alianza Popular. This party brought together many Franco supporters and leaders, including the so called “magnificent seven”, seven Francosit Ministers during the dictatorship. Alianza Popular was refounded in 1989 resulting in the creation of PP, which nowadays has 88 parliamentary seats in the Spanish Congress of Deputies. The Francoist succession line doesn’t end with PP, as many of its former members are nowadays members of the far-right-wing party VOX, which nowadays has 52 seats in the Spanish Congress of Deputies. VOX’s links to Francoism can be also shown in the fact that, for instance, Cádiz’s and Castellon’s heads of VOX’s lists in the general election in 2019, signed the “Declaration of respect and reparation to General Francisco Franco Bahamonde, soldier of Spain”.On the other hand, during the transition the judiciary system maintained most of the judges that were active during the dictatorship and most of the buildings that fostered the Francoist courts. A very graphic image is the fact that the Francoist’s Tribunal de Orden Público (Public Order Court) became the Audiencia Nacional (National Court) overnight, without suffering any relevant changes.
The transition to democracy was not peaceful as it was heavily marked by ETA’s acts of terrorism and the attempted military coup d’état led by General Tejero in Madrid and Valencia on the 23rd February of 1981.
The evolution of historical memory laws and public policies since the Dictatorship until 2023
The traumatic events mentioned previously shape a big part of Spanish society, but, regardless of their importance, many of them are condemned to oblivion because of the Pact of Forgetting. Even if the scope of this law does not entail the prohibition of memory laws, many Spanish governments have been extremely reluctant to adopt public policies in this sense.
During the dictatorship, memory public policies were deployed regarding the facts that happened during the Civil War. As it is obvious, these laws excluded, criminalised, stigmatised and made invisible all the victims opposed to the regime. Instead, very important measures of recognition and moral reparation were established regarding the victims that fought on Franco’s side. For instance, the State funded the exhumation of mass graves where Franco’s supporters were buried; monuments commemorating “the fallen” and the pro-Franco heroes were built; municipalities, infrastructures and streets were named after relevant people for the Coup d’État, etc. The most important memory project made during the dictatorship is the “Valle de los Caídos” (Valley of the Fallen), a Francoist burial memorial built from 1940 to 1959 by forced republican labour, where the dictator was buried from 1975 until 2019. It is also relevant the “Monumento de los Héroes de España” (Monument to the Heroes of Spain), built in 1941 in Melilla.
During the Transition and until the begging of the 2000s, public authorities carried out symbolic memory measures, such as public victims’ recognitions or the building of monuments, but did not commit to making deep acts to repair the consequences of the dictatorship. Those years of memorial inactivity were headed by PSOE and PP governments. It is important to underline the role that civil society had during those years, specially by funding, privately, the exhumation of multiple mass graves and building commemorative monuments. For instance, in the early 1960, in Navarra was built one of the first plaques of remembrances thanks to the effort of families of the area in honor of three murdered Republicans in 1936. In parallel, on the 20th of November of 2002, the Constitutional Commission of the Spanish Congress passed unanimously the Non-Law Proposition enacting the “moral recognition of all man and women that were victims of the Spanish Civil war, and of those who suffered repression during the dictatorship”, which was later reiterated by the plenum of the Spanish Congress of Deputies on the 1st of June of 2004. Despite all these measures, it did not exist any State’s unitarian regulatory framework regarding historical memory until 2007, when the “Ley 52/2007, de 26 de diciembre, por la que se reconoce y amplían derechos y se establecen medidas en favor de quienes padecieron persecución o violencia durante la dictadura” (Law 52/2007, of December 26, which recognises and expands rights and establishes measures in favor of those who suffered persecution or violence during the dictatorship, from now on, Law 52/2007), was passed during the VIII legislature governed by PSOE.
Law 52/2007 meant a clear answer to the demands made by civil society and the European Commission. This last one, on the 17th of March of 2006, issued a recommendation by which it condemned the “serious violations of Human Rights committed in Spain by the Franco regime“. This law made a general recognition of victims, their individual and collective right to reparation, and declared ex lege the illegality of the repressive Francoists institutions. Also, in this same context the Agreement of the Council of Ministers of 31st of October of 2008 was adopted, by which Francois’s symbols had to be withdrawn from all the properties of the National State Administration. This law was implemented until 2011, when PP obtained an absolute majority in Congress and the Senate, and decided to eliminate the budget line for this purpose. For the next two legislative terms, memorialist civil society organizations suffered the State’s institutional abandonment, at which point regional and local legislations proliferated. During this right-wing governed period of time, two important facts took place: the visit of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances and the visit of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, which culminated in two important reports in 2014. They both pointed out the need for Spain to assume the international obligation of searching effectively the disappeared people during the Civil War and Dictatorship, and expressed worry about the generalised practice of privately funded exhumations.
After this dark period for historical memory, in 2018 PSOE, together with Unidas Podemos, started governing Spain, which meant an improvement in historical memory public policies. For starters, the National Department of Historical Memory was created and the 80th birthday of the Spanish republican exile was commemorated. Also, a historical milestone was reached: in 2019, Franco was exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen, which caused a lot of resistance from the right-wing movement.
Finally, on October 2022, Ley 20/2022, de 19 de Octubre, de Memoria Democrática (Law 20/2022, of October 19, on Democratic Memory, from now on, Law 20/2022) was passed. This law has two objectives: on the one hand, it aims to promote knowledge of the democratic periods of Spanish history and of all those individual figures and collective movements that built the links of democratic culture that allowed reaching the agreements of the current democracy, and on the other, it seeks to preserve and maintain the memory of the victims of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, through knowledge of the truth, the establishment of justice and promotion of reparation and the establishment of a duty of memory of the public powers, to avoid repetition in any way of political violence or totalitarianism. As the preamble of this law establishes: “This law is intended to close a debt of Spanish democracy with its past and promote a common discourse based on the defense of peace, pluralism and the condemnation of all forms of political totalitarianism that jeopardize the effective enjoyment of rights and freedoms inherent to human dignity. And, to this extent, it is also a commitment with the future, defending democracy and fundamental rights as a paradigm common and indelible horizon of our public life, coexistence and civic conscience.” Some of the new measures that it introduces are the establishment of a penalty regime for some acts related to Francoism glorification and victim’s humiliation, the creation of a Public Prosecutor focused on victims’ rights reparation and investigation of Francoist’s crimes in the Tribunal Supremo, and the dissolution of associations that glorify the dictatorship, among others.
Extreme right-wing and right-wing narratives on historical memory
Historically, far-right parties and associations in Spain are against any historical memory public policies and try to implement their own interpretation of the events that took place during the XX century, an interpretation that is not aligned with the human rights approach of the conflict. Because of this political line of action, David Sassoli, former president of the European Parliament, expressed in 2020 that:
“The legitimate, constitutional and democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic was overthrown by a coup. The one who led that uprising, General Franco, was a dictator and his regime practiced the systematic persecution and elimination of his political adversaries. Blaming the parties that supported that government for “destroying democracy and freedoms” is not debatable, it is a falsification of history. Count on my commitment to the defense of the freedom of expression of each and every one of the members of this house and on the assurance that in its exercise there will be no place for the glorification of any dictatorship.”
For the purpose of this paper, we will focus on the far-right party VOX and other relevant actors.
VOX
VOX is a far-right party created in 2013 by Santiago Abascal, former member of PP and former President of DENAES. This party biggest characteristic, apart from its far-right ideology with heavy positioning against migrants and women, is its populism and the speed by which it has reached an important role in the Spanish institutions, including the regional ones. It has been defined as a party with “ethnonationalist baggage, rhetoric against the political class and the progressive consensus, along with the general defense of individual liberty and a pro-market policy agenda”.
Regarding historical memory, VOX defends the false premise that history is apolitical, expressing a very liberal interpretation of the Spanish conflict from the Coup d’État until the Transition, which is translated in the fact that, at least publicly and as a party, it doesn’t promote a specific interpretation of the past. It calls for leaving the Spanish history to what they consider it is, the past, as, quoting Ivan Espinosa de los Monteros, VOX representative in the Congress of the Deputies, to talk about historical memory means “(…) to talk about things that happened more than eighty or ninety years ago. We are talking about an absolute waste of time.” .
Vox promotes the oblivion of Franco’s dictatorship and opts for putting all the politicians’ efforts to work for what they consider the future of the nation is, and not spend energy on stirring up the past. Ivan Espinosa de los Monteros, when criticizing the new historical memory law in 2021 said that “what we politicians and the government should be busy with is thinking about the future, not the past. Thinking about how we are going to get ahead, with a GDP that has fallen… unemployment rate… ERTES or camouflaged unemployed… we have very serious problems facing the future, and every minute we waste talking about the past, talking about the war, talking about things that don’t even concern grandparents anymore, they concerned great-grandparents…”. Nevertheless, their need to forget and move forward collides with their glorification of the existing social order during Francoism. A VOX supporter, in a personal communication in the aforementioned academic paper, said that the dictatorship was “a difficult regime to characterize, with great value in public order. Public order in Spain during the Franco regime was, to be honest, exceptional. Which is something that draws attention to the sectors of the right enormously. May there be safety, may there be peace. Let there be no robberies. (…) It is true that it was a very very very quiet time. (…)