Franco 'trending topic'
BarcelonaPierre Vilar told his students that "understanding the past means learning to read a newspaper." It seems like a simple phrase, but it's also a warning. To make it a reality, two conditions would be needed: a historical consensus born from memory and courageous newspapers that escape dogmatism and entrenched positions. Today, if we read the newspapers, what we discover is not only the persistent return of Francoism, but our inability to confront it. If some young people read them, they might even find a benign and distorted view of history with total impunity and shamelessness.
Fifty years after the death of Francisco Franco, the dictator continues to circulate in public debate with surprising ease. We never completely buried him. In fact, we relocated him, resignified him, turned him into a subject of parliamentary debate, and finally, a viral product. Today, Franco appears on young people's phones as a meme, a caricature, a likeable old man who's funny on TikTok. It's not an algorithm error; It is a failure of memory and a political manipulation by its heirs.
Spain is beginning to have an election campaign soundtrack, and Pedro Sánchez's announcement to commemorate "fifty years of freedom" has provoked a Pavlovian response from the Spanish right. Feijóo says he's too lazy; Vox displays performative indignation and shamelessly claims that one can speak "well or ill" of the dictator as one reviews a TV series. In Spain, a banal deconstruction of fascism is circulating, which has political consequences and is a luxury only afforded by democracies that haven't done their homework and usually pay dearly for it.
A bloodthirsty dictator and a complacent country
The reality of Franco dismantles the benign portrait of a nondescript general. Certainly, he wasn't brilliant, but he was persistent. He wasn't charismatic, but he was skilled in the combined use of fear and propaganda. He governed with three simple ideas—order, unity, obedience—and extraordinary determination. And part of society, exhausted or terrified, accepted his narrative, and part of the elite found comfort—including economic comfort—and impunity.
A part of Spanish political culture is still made of this stuff—fear of conflict and, at the same time, an inability to engage in dialogue, tolerance of corruption, and a fascination with strongmen. A legacy that doesn't disappear because no one has wanted to examine it in sufficient depth.
Faced with the facts, surprise is naive. A significant segment of young people between 18 and 25 years old do not consider democracy a better system than others, and 20% of citizens view the dictatorship positively. What's needed isn't outrage, but rather to ask ourselves what we haven't explained.
In twenty years, nine million people have finished their schooling without rigorously studying the Civil War, the Franco regime, or the Transition. Without listening to the victims. In a country where archives remain partially closed and where no Francoist crime has been prosecuted, history is displaced by caricature. And caricature always favors the powerful, not the victim.
The space that schools don't occupy is filled by social media: a sanitized Franco, reduced to a likeable character, is easier to consume than a bloodthirsty Franco. The past, when not addressed, returns in the form of caricature and provocation.
The art of manipulating memory
The PP, heir to Aliança Popular, still hasn't issued a clear condemnation of Francoism. This isn't a minor detail; it's a burden. And competition with Vox has pushed the party toward a revisionism that is all too reminiscent of other countries: be it France, Austria, the Netherlands, or Germany. The strategy is the same: to separate the dictator from his legacy, to turn him into a useful tool for a narrative of order and identity.
The Transition was a political triumph built on a pact of silence. The complete lack of purging of state structures explains everything: the impervious judiciary, the closed archives, the impossibility of investigating the regime's crimes. Lawsuits for disappearances, torture, and stolen babies filed away. Not a crack in the wall, and the trauma transformed into silence for so many families.
If Franco returns today, it's not because of him. It's because of us. That's why we prefer prudence to truth, consensus to conflict, apparent coexistence to real justice. And because we believed that time resolves everything, when time only festers wounds.
That's why the right can violate memory with disturbing ease, and the far right can display it like a trophy. That's why some young people can see Franco as a humorous figure and not the man responsible for thousands of executions, torture, and starvation.
Franco isn't coming back. He never truly left. Spain hasn't overcome Francoism because it hasn't confronted it. And until it does, democracy will be vulnerable, easily manipulated, always ready to believe the first oversimplification offered.
Memory is not an ideological whim; it is a democratic condition.
And above all, it is a duty to its victims.