This Wednesday, January 8, 2025, the government of Pedro Sánchez launched with great fanfare, in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, a commemorative marathon to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Franco’s death. This initiative is not at all to the taste of the opposition, which sees it as a way of creating a diversion and pitting the Spaniards against each other.
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With our correspondent in Madrid, Francois Musseau
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez sets up a commemorative marathon. There will be around a hundred official events throughout 2025, exhibitions, conferences, documentaries, activities in high schools and colleges.
The objective: not to talk about the dictator Francodied in 1975 after four decades in power, but celebrate half a century of Spanish democracy, its freedoms and its social advances. Pedro Sánchez thus started the year strongly by championing against the old dictatorial regime.
But many are cautious. The king Felipe VI decided not to participate in this inaugural session. As for the right-wing opposition, it also refused to be part of it, and considered that these commemorative acts, 50 years after the death of the dictator, are a maneuver by the socialists in power in order to conceal the legal scandals of which they are involved, in particular those concerning the wife and brother of the head of government.
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At the same time, a hundred renowned intellectuals, from the right and the left, published a manifesto denouncing Pedro Sánchez’s initiative, believing that by focusing on the figure of Franco, it cannot, ” than build a wall between the Spaniards “.