Franco’s political heirs in trouble in Spain

This video says about itself:

Dictator Franco had the basilica of Valle de Los Caidos built as his burial place. With the government fast tracking the Historical Memory bill, the monument could lose its political significance.

By Vicky Short and Paul Stuart:

Spain: The Popular Party begins to fracture

20 June 2008

Spain’s right-wing opposition Popular Party (PP) is engulfed in a bitter internal political as today’s three-day national conference begins.

The pro-PP El Mundo says the atmosphere inside the party resembles “a state of paranoia.” According to [also pro-PP daily] ABC, PP officials are trying to prevent these tensions erupting at the conference and “opening the Pandora box of confrontations in the streets.”

The immediate source of the conflict is the PP’s two successive general election defeats, in March 2004 and March 2008. More fundamentally, it represents the fracturing of the PP whose architect was the Francoist minister Manuel Fraga and the unravelling of the 1978 constitutional arrangements that were put into place during the “transition to democracy” after Franco’s death in 1975.

Just before the March 2007 [sic; March 2008] national elections, the popularity of the ruling Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) had hit a low and commentators anticipated a narrow PP victory. However, the PSOE was re-elected due to popular hostility to the PP’s neo-liberal economic policies and its support for the war in Iraq—the same political hostility that brought the PSOE, the undeserving beneficiary of a leftward radicalisation of the working class, into office in March 2004.

The PP reacted to defeat with undisguised fury. Denouncing the new government as illegitimate and the product of a left-wing coup, defeated PP leader José Maria Aznar and the PP launched a four-year campaign of “confrontation” together with the Catholic Church and sections of the army—involving repeated provocations on the issues of regional autonomy, negotiations with the armed Basque separatist ETA, the PSOE’s social policies and in defence of Franco’s heritage.

Spanish archive sheds light on Franco’s dark days: here.