Spain’s Remembrance Backsliding

Jorge González-Gallarza | 13th July 2022 | Brussels, Comment

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By directing the state’s remembrance policy towards score-settling, Spain’s left-wing government is dangerously reawakening a long-defunct conflict.

For four years now, Spain has been undergoing a stealthy form of regime change. Since taking office in June 2018 on a coalition with the far-left Podemos and a constellation of left-regionalist parties, the government of socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has sought to replace what Spaniards call their “regime of 1978” with a totally new dispensation. That regime took shape in the years following Franco’s death in 1975, as parties theretofore banned under the strongman’s 40-year rule agreed with pro-modernizing elements across the aisle on the country’s new democratic Constitution. That Constitution was soon after backed by over 90% of the voting public in a referendum and is still polling to this day, despite some less popular facets, at around 70% of approval among Spaniards. As a crucial condition of that transition, the previous year had seen the country’s best effort to bury the last remnant of the three-year Civil War that Franco’s nationalist camp had claimed power by winnin...

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