Alex Trelinski
SPAIN will stage over 100 events next year to commemorate 50 years of democracy following the death of dictator General Franco in 1975.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Tuesday that the government wants 2025 to be the year to ‘value the great transformation of Spain in this half century of democracy and pay tribute to the people who have made it possible’.
He said the events will be held in schools, auditoriums and museums throughout the country to commemorate ‘Spain’s 50 years in freedom’.
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“This was a profound transformation that did not happen by chance, but is the result of the sacrifice of many people,” Sanchez said.
He promised that a special commissioner would be appointed to organise the commemoration working with a ‘committee of experts’.
The announcement was made during a gala in which the government honoured 21 victims of Francoism and granted their relatives a declaration of ‘reparation and personal recognition’.
Among names of the past honoured were the Andalucian socialist politician Blas Infante(assassinated in 1936); the attorney general Francisco Javier Elola(executed In 1939); and the Orihuela poet and playwright Miguel Hernandez, who died in an Alicante prison in 1942.
The latter’s daughter-in-law thanked Sanchez for his ‘courage’ in pushing through the Law of Democratic Memory.
Pedro Sanchez said that 5,600 bodies of Civil War victims and the years of the Franco dictatorship had so far been exhumed ‘thanks to this law’.
The approval of the Democratic Memory Law in 2022 was opposed by the conservative Partido Popular and the far-right Vox party.
They have worked together in several Spanish regions to draft an alternative set of rules which they have called ‘harmony laws’.
Sanchez said: “This is a perversion of the meaning of harmony, because there is no harmony when laws are agreed with those who are enemies of freedom.”
The Prime Minister warned that ‘the danger of regression exists’ and, quoting what was stated by UN experts this year over some regional moves, adding that ‘there is no possible harmony when there is a deliberate forgetting and falsification of history’.
