The silent setback of the democratic memory law where PP and Vox govern

BarcelonaExactly 90 years ago, the poet Federico García Lorca was shot on the outskirts of Granada, in a place between the municipalities of Alfacar and Víznar that no one has yet been able to confirm with exactitude. His disappearance is not an exception: it is the best-known symbol of a phenomenon that remains open throughout the State and that, right now, is experiencing a silent setback where the PP and Vox share government. Just as the anniversary of Lorca's death is being commemorated, the Junta de Andalucía – the autonomous community where the poet was from and which has the most mass graves in the entire State, with more than 3,000 people buried in the Víznar ravine alone – has set an expiration date for the law that protects the search for the disappeared of Francoism.

The Andalusian case, between the law of memory and the law of "concord"

In 2022, the State approved Law 20/2022 on democratic memory, the regulation that expanded the Historical Memory Law of 2007 and which imposes on all public administrations a "duty of memory": to search for and exhume victims of the Civil War and Francoism, remove Francoist symbolism from public spaces, and also maintain public maps of mass graves. Regarding the first regulation from 2007, 12 out of 17 autonomous communities approved their own memory laws – such as the one Andalusia validated in 2017, without a single vote against – which develop and finance this historical duty in each territory. Thus, it is the communities that subsidize excavations, manage the maps of mass graves, and process aid for families.

It is precisely this Andalusian law that is now in danger. On July 2, Juan Manuel Moreno (PP) was invested president of the Junta with the votes of Vox. The government pact between the Popular Party and the far-right party provided for the approval of a "concord law" to replace the Andalusian memory law of 2017. The difference between the two is clear – if we take as an example the regulations proposed by other communities governed by the PP and Vox –: while the memory law starts from the specific recognition of the victims of Francoism, concord laws tend to erase this specificity and speak, in generic terms, of "all victims of violence" from both sides – an equation that places the crimes of a dictatorship and those of a war conflict on the same level.

In practice, this would translate into three changes: the administration will no longer be obliged to promote exhumations on its own initiative and will depend on the family requesting it; the budgets allocated to excavations will be reduced or disappear as a specific item, and the public maps of mass graves will cease to be binding. In Andalusia, this uncertainty is already noticeable on the ground: in Cordoba, the city council has had to resort to minor emergency contracts to avoid stopping excavations at the La Salud mass grave, where it is estimated that up to 4,000 victims may be buried, also counting the neighboring San Rafael mass grave.

A copied pattern

The Andalusian case is not an isolated case: it is the fifth chapter of a series that is repeated almost identically wherever the PP and Vox share government. The mechanism is always the same: the regional memory law is repealed and replaced by a "concord law"; the Spanish government appeals this elimination to the Constitutional Court (TC) invoking article 161.2 of the Constitution, which allows the challenged decision to be provisionally suspended while its merits are resolved.

The Balearic Islands, the Valencian Country, Cantabria and Extremadura are the most accomplished cases. In the Balearic Islands, the repeal approved last March with the votes of the PP and Vox was suspended by the Constitutional Court in July, after Memòria de Mallorca reported that Marga Prohens' government had maintained the law in "deliberate inactivity" for three years before repealing it. In the Valencian Country, the Constitutional Court has provisionally suspended several articles of the concord law approved in 2024, although it has not yet ruled on the merits of the case. In Cantabria, the PP repealed the memory law in November 2024 with the support of Vox, and the TC also provisionally suspended this repeal while it resolves the appeal. Extremadura is the most recent case: the repeal was part of María Guardiola's investiture pact since 2023 and was finalized in October 2025; the Spanish government's appeal is just over a month old.

But it is Aragon that breaks the narrative that the TC always protects these laws while resolving. The community was the first to repeal the memory law, in February 2024, and the court suspended its repeal that June. The problem is that the legal deadline of five months to ratify the suspension expired on October 29, 2024, without a ruling on the merits: the Aragonese repeal is, today, in force de facto, despite the case remaining open.

The PP and Vox "Concordia Plan" in Aragon – which also avoids mentioning Franco or the Civil War – maintains a budget of only 110,000 euros of its own for exhumations, in a territory with more than 1,000 documented mass graves on the map of mass graves in this community. The removal of the binding nature of the mass grave maps is a measure that was also included in the proposals from Castile and León and the Valencian Community.

Exceptions

Not all territories with a PP-Vox pact have followed the same path. InCastilla y León, the PP and Vox initiated the procedures to move forward with the law of concord, but with the departure of the far-right party from the autonomous government, the popular party slowed down this norm and, in fact, voted alongside the PSOE not to process it. In Murcia, on the other hand, where the PP governs with the external support of Vox, there has been no formal repeal of the norm because this autonomous community does not have its own law. However, for example, the Murcian government refuses to send the State the catalog of Francoist vestiges that still remain in the territory, a catalog elaborated by the same Murcian memorialist entities.