Ninety years humiliating the defeated

Alberto Núñez Feijóo has decided that if the democratic game doesn't favor him enough, the rules must be changed. If he doesn't win, the problem is the system, not him. And some of the citizens who have the right to vote recognized. He fiddlesby crossing the dangerous red line of instilling distrust and suspicion in the guarantees of the process itself. If the difficulties many residents abroad face in getting their vote from where they live are well known, now the leader of the Popular Party intends to put obstacles in the way of a specific type of Spaniards living outside state territory: the grandchildren and descendants of exiles and emigrants who were forced to leave the country, let's say, due to force majeure. Feijóo hasn't even ruffled his hair questioning the validity of a law that aims to repair in the present the consequences of the fierce repression of the war and the dictatorship. Both he and part of the PP and, of course, Vox, seem to want to continue humiliating the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship ninety years after the "alzamiento" (which was not national at all, "national" was the Republic). As if the executions, prison, and exile of all those who committed no greater crime than defending themselves from fascism were not enough, as if the violence of the past were not enough, now it seems they want to continue perpetuating it in the present. If Franco wanted to exterminate all the elements he considered impure and subversive, and turned Spaniards who were not as he believed they should be into enemies, now the aim is to eliminate the vestiges, memories, and narrative of those who come directly from the horror and are the fruit of the barbarism that began that July of '36. Later they will say that it is the left that digs up the Civil War dead and they will complain about being considered heirs of the dictatorship, but when they attack the losers they show whose sons and grandsons they are. 

If Feijóo directly attacks this specific type of voter abroad, it is because he assumes they must all be reds. He does not question other reparative recognitions, such as that given to the descendants of Sephardic Jews who were expelled more than five centuries ago and who can obtain nationality if they prove Hispanic lineage (which, of course, does not happen with the Moriscos, even though they were also victims of Catholic persecution). Nor does he focus on the differences in the time that foreign residents need to obtain their ID cards based on their origin: coming from Latin American countries, two years is enough, while from places like Morocco (which is also, in part, a former colony; the last colony, in fact) the requirement is 10 years of uninterrupted residence in the territory, due to a colonialist vision that considers that the inhabitants of the Americas are part of the same culture simply because they share the same language. Núñez Feijóo does not confront this electorate because he believes they are mostly right-wing (in Madrid, where the majority of immigration is, they directly address "Latinos" to fish for votes).

But all this is just a plan in the discourse of the PP president, who always says one thing meaning another or saying both at the same time so that each sector he addresses reads it as they wish, with a always sibilant and calculated ambivalence. He mixes the issue of grandchildren with that of the regularization of immigrants, as if they were the same. One only needs to superimpose his statements onto images of the kilometer-long queues of undocumented people who these days are going through the process to obtain residency, as if they were queues to assault democracy. And thus, with a few sentences, he points to two enemies at once: the foreigner of the present and the estranged foreigner of the past.