“They can dig up Franco 100 times and they can behave nostalgic for the confrontation between Spaniards,” he said, in reference to the exhumation in 2019 of the body of the general who led Spain from 1939 to 1975 of the impressive mausoleum of the “Valle de los Caídos”, a monumental basilica built on his orders near Madrid.
“They’re bothering us with this!” “
“With their bitterness, they want to return to the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. They are boring us with that! We, with the Spaniards of today, we work for the Spaniards of tomorrow,” concluded the leader of the Popular Party, a conservative party founded in 1989 by a former minister of Franco.
On Tuesday, government spokesperson Pilar Alegría did not hesitate to recall the origins of the PP at a press conference to attack the opposition. “Honestly, if celebrating democracy and freedom bores anyone, it’s worrying to say the least,” she said.
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“But I believe that more than boredom, what this produces in Mr. Feijóo and within the Popular Party is embarrassment. Especially because we all know the history of the origin of the Popular Party and we know who its members and fellow travelers are,” continued Ms. Alegría. “It seems important to me to remember with these commemorations that the civil war (between 1936 and 1939, which preceded the dictator’s coming to power), was not just a fight between our grandparents,” he said. -she concluded.
Unclosed wounds
The government of Pedro Sánchez, who was already at the head of Spain when Franco was exhumed in 2019, then passed a law called “democratic memory” in 2022, intended to rehabilitate the victims of Francoism.
But the subject still divides in a country where the wounds of the past have not healed and where the right had promised the repeal of this text if it returned to power.
