The Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, has instructed the legal service of the ministry to prepare a report to take the offensive of the regional governments of the PP and Vox parties against memory legislation to the Constitutional Court, which they have decided to replace with laws called “of concord.” As reported by EL PAÍS, the report will be presented on Tuesday at the Council of Ministers. The first step will be to try to reach an agreement with the Government of Aragon, which has already repealed the regional memory law. If this is not possible, the Government will file an appeal with the Constitutional Court and proceed similarly with the laws that the PP and Vox parties intend to pass in the Valencian Community and Castilla y León to replace the current regional legislation. In any case, the Democratic Memory Law, at a national level, remains in force throughout Spain.
In Aragon, the bipartite government repealed the regional memory law in February through an urgent procedure, a single reading process. The PP and Vox had presented the legislative initiative – a single article for a single purpose: to repeal the law – on November 20, 2023, the anniversary of Franco’s death. The Minister of Territorial Policy recalled that the repealed law, from 2018, included “many amendments” proposed by the Popular Party: “The PP self-corrects under pressure from the far-right,” he lamented. Torres explained that by eliminating this regional law, the regional map of mass graves is also eliminated, making it difficult to locate victims, as well as the tribute to Aragonese citizens who died in Nazi concentration camps. “This violates international law and undermines the defense of human rights,” he said after consulting with the ministry’s legal services. Asked how the repeal will affect the relatives of the victims while the conflict between the Administrations is resolved, the minister assured that the central government will try to fill the gaps and deficits caused by the PP and Vox policies in the different territories.
Last Tuesday, representatives of the PP and Vox parliamentary groups in Castilla y León also presented a draft law to repeal the memory decree in the region, approved in 2018. The pretext was that the law was based on “a biased and sectarian view of history” and that it was necessary to “eliminate ideological impositions that try to establish an official version,” as stated by Carlos Menéndez, a far-right deputy. According to the new regulatory narrative to be approved by the bipartite government, the Civil War did not result from the coup d’état of July 1936, but from “previous confrontation dynamics” taken to “paroxysm,” that is, to the exaltation of passions. This new text negotiated by the PP and Vox parties goes back to 1931 and avoids the word “dictatorship.” Asked for the reason, the Popular Party deputy Raúl de la Hoz stated at a press conference that condemnation of that period was “implicit.” However, his partner reiterated that Vox does not make “evaluations” of “any historical period” and insisted that the new text gives “the same treatment to all political victims of the period between 1931 and 1978.” De la Hoz stated that this in no way means “equating the Second Republic with the dictatorship.”
In response to whether it is compatible to promote “concord” when the leader of his party, Santiago Abascal, maintains that the Pedro Sánchez government is “the worst in 80 years,” the Vox spokesperson asserted that “of course”: “Not only is it the worst of our democracy, but of the most recent historical period of Spain.” On social media, the ultra-party MEP Herman Tertsch celebrated on March 28 that Madrid had been “liberated by Franco after 32 months of red terror” in 1939. “What Vox intends is to whitewash the dictatorship and it is unacceptable from the perspective of the Constitution. No democrat can be complicit in that,” he added.
In the Valencian Community, the PP and Vox parties also presented a draft law on March 21 for a “concord law” to replace the current regional memory law from 2017. The text replicates the paragraph about the “paroxysm” that they believe triggered the Civil War and establishes that “a highly technical direction” will guarantee the autonomy of families’ will “without reopening questions of legitimacy of regimes, all of which, without exception, are part of our national history.” It also states that the memory legislation approved by leftist governments decreed “state interference in the conscience of Spaniards” to “mold their individual memory, prohibit freedom of opinion, limit academic freedom, and penalize the work of historians if it does not align with a sectarian and biased interpretation of historical events.” The Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory denied this: “It is Vox who wants to impose on us what we should think, what we should read or the plays we should see,” he said, referring to recent episodes of censorship in different municipalities where the far-right governs with the Popular Party.
The PP and Vox claim, to repeal regional memory legislation, that it only caters to victims of one side, impedes “concord” among Spaniards, and attacks the 1978 Constitution and the democratic transition. These are false premises. The legislation protects all victims, regardless of ideology, as noted by the Minister of Territorial Policy. In practice, it is families of the losing side of the war who benefit the most because it is their relatives who still lie in mass graves and ditches, as Franco created his particular memory legislation throughout the dictatorship to recover the remains of those “fallen for God and for Spain” – he commissioned an exhumation protocol – and to compensate their descendants through various symbolic and economic means. Everything was registered in the Official State Gazette. The word “concord,” with which the PP and Vox have named the replacement laws, is also present in all the texts they seek to repeal. It is also not true that these texts attack the democratic transition or the 1978 Constitution. On the contrary, there are practically identical paragraphs to that effect between the new texts promoted by the right and the far-right and those they seek to abolish.
