Europe|Spanish Court Approves Franco’s Exhumation
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MADRID – The Supreme Court in Spain on Tuesday approvedthe government plan to exhume Francisco Franco, the former dictator, in a case that revived the debate over his legacy, 80 years after he won the country civil war and started building the underground basilica in which he was later buried.
The judges approved the exhumation unanimously, according to a spokeswoman for the court. Their decision was made behind closed doors, and a full verdict is expected to be published in the coming days.
The decision follows a yearlong judicial battle betweenthe caretaker Socialist governmentof Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and the family of Franco, who sought to block the exhumation. Franco’s relatives could appeal to the Spanish Constitutional Court, but they would first have to demonstrate that the Supreme Court ruling breached fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
Even if the family were to make a final appeal, Mr. Sánchez’s administration is expected to go ahead with the exhumation before Nov. 10, when Spain is to holda repeat national election. The election – the fourth in four years – was called this month, after Mr. Sánchez failed to garner sufficient support from smaller parties to get voted into office by Parliament.
Upon taking office in June 2018, Sánchez announced that Franco’s exhumation would happen “immediately.” Instead, his plan got entangled in a political and legal quagmire, which also revived the debate over the law of amnesty for past crimes that was adopted in 1977, two years after Franco’s death, as part of Spain’s return to democracy.
Franco’s relatives appealed to the Supreme Court, whichsuspended the exhumation planin June to give it time to review the case. While the government has suggested that Franco should be moved to his family crypt in the cemetery of El Pardo, on the outskirts of Madrid, Franco’s family has argued that the only alternative resting place for the former dictator would be inside the crypt of Madrid’s cathedral – a suggestion that the government vowed to block.
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Mr. Sánchez wants to exhume Franco as part of a broader effort to revive a law of historical memory that was approved in 2007, under a previous Socialist government, but was shelved and deprived of state funding by the conservative government led by Mariano Rajoy. One of the main goals of the law was to support and help finance the opening of the more than 2, 000 mass graves that dot Spain and to identify the remains of those inside, who mostly died during the three years of the civil war of the 1930 s.
Conservative politicians have denounced Sánchez’s determination to exhume Franco as a political strategy to strengthen ideological divisions, but it has led to concerns that it could also bolster the far right. Last April, Vox, an ultranationalist party,got its first seats in Parliamentafter it won 10 percent of the votes in the national election. Mr. Sánchez and his Socialists won the election in April, but fell short of an outright majority of Parliament seats.
Mr. Sánchez will be hoping that voters give the Socialists a stronger mandate to govern in the do-over election, and he has been bolstered by the splintering of some smaller left-wing parties. But there is no guarantee that the new vote will yield a different result, and opinion polls suggest that turnout will be low.
The disillusionment comes in part because of voters’ exasperation with a generation of party leaders who have plunged Spain into another round of political limbo,similar to that of 2016, when Spain spent 10 months under a caretaker conservative government.
Ignacio del Valle, a novelist whose books are often set during Franco’s rule, said that, while it made sense to remove Franco from a burial site that was built as “a pantheon for a dictator,” he was against the politics surrounding Mr. Sánchez’s plan. “We don’t need to exhume a corpse now to cover up for the incapacity of the politicians of this generation,” he said.
Even if Franco were to be exhumed before the election, Spanish politicians have already engaged in a dispute about what to do withthe dictator’s current burial site, known as the Valley of the Fallen, which is also one of Europe’s largest mass graves. At least 33, 000 were buried there after the civil war, including some Republican prisoners whom Franco used as his labor force to build the mausoleum and its underground basilica.
José Guirao, the Spanish culture minister, has suggested that the site could be transformed in a similar way to the Nazi concentration camps that were opened to the public after World War II, “so that people don’t forget the horror.”
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