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As historic PPPP Your browser does not support the element.turning-points go, it was squalid. On November 20th 1975 Francisco Franco, who had ruled Spain for almost 40 years, was declared dead, his body already rotting. That eventually ushered in a transition to democracy under King Juan Carlos. Today, most Spaniards give no thought to Franco. But Pedro Sánchez, the Socialist prime minister, thinks they should. Not long after becoming prime minister in 2019 Mr Sánchez organised the exhumation of Franco’s remains from the Valley of the Fallen, the dictator’s grandiose monument to his victory in the Spanish civil war, and their reburial in a quiet cemetery. Many cheered.To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the dictator’s death, on January 8th Mr Sánchez launched a government plan that will see events in schools, universities and public places under the slogan “Spain in Liberty”. Officials note that polls find that a quarter of young Spanish men think that in some circumstances authoritarian government can be preferable to democracy. “Those who sing the praises of authoritarianism want us to forget…that Spain was governed by an autocratic and repressive minority,” Mr Sánchez said. Some question why the government has chosen to mark the dictator’s death in his hospital bed, rather than the arrival of democracy—by commemorating, say, the 1977 election or the 1978 constitution. The conservative opposition People’s Party () sees in that choice an attempt to divide Spaniards and a smokescreen to distract attention from corruption scandals.Mr Sánchez knows that discussing the dictatorship makes the queasier than it should, partly because it looks over its shoulder at Vox, a hard-right party. But his critics argue that he is using the past to fight today’s political battles—precisely what the leaders of the transition renounced.
