On June 2nd, a historic situation will unfold in Spain: for the first time in democracy, a former Spanish prime minister will appear before a judge as an investigated person. It will be José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, about whom magistrate José Luis Calama has indications that he headed a corrupt "network" of influence peddling. He will be the first if we assume that Spanish democracy restarted in 1977, with the first elections after the dictator's death. But during the Second Republic, a nascent democratic system had already been put in place —in 1933 women were able to vote for the first time— and a former prime minister had already been charged: in 1934 the Barcelona Court of Justice —delegated by the Supreme Court— investigated Manuel Azaña as a presumed collaborator in the proclamation of the Catalan State.

I start a bit far away, but it's about Trump... Manuel Azaña was the most vilified and hated Spanish political figure by the right during the republican years. He symbolized progressive reforms and anti-clericalism. He was not, by any means, a radical, but they painted him as if he were. As head of government and president, he was the main target of conservative propaganda, which considered him ultimately responsible for the "destruction" of the traditional order, that is, for secular inequality in favor of a few. A few years ago, in a rewriting operation, some fascist ideologues and publicists wanted to appropriate the patriotic Azaña, sidelining the progressivism that his intellectual parents and grandparents had so much denounced. The aim was thus to discredit Zapatero and Sánchez, supposed anti-patriots who sought to resolve the perennial mismatch of Catalonia. Fortunately, the rewriting of history has its limits.