The last public statue in Spain of former dictator Francisco Franco has been removed from the city gates of Melilla, a Spanish enclave and autonomous city on the northwest African coast.
Without much fanfare, a group of workers took down the statue on Tuesday, using a mechanical shovel and heavy drills to cut down the brick platform on which the statue stood before lifting it and chasing it away through a chain around its neck. has. bubble wrap on a bowl.
The statue, erected in 1978, three years after Franco’s death, commemorates his role as commander of the Spanish Legion in the Rif War, a conflict fought by Spain and France in the 1920s against the Berber tribes of the Rif mountain range Morocco.
“This is a historic day for Melilla,” Elena Fernandez Trevino, in charge of education and culture in the enclave, said on Monday after the local assembly voted to take down the statue, pointing out that it was “the only statue that to a dictator still in the public sphere in Europe ”.
Only the far-right Vox party voted against the move, arguing that the statue celebrated Franco’s military role and not his dictatorship, so the Historical Memory Law, a 2007 law requiring the removal of all symbols attached to Franco’s regime requires, not apply.
The Spanish government has made several sensational removals on the back of this law, including taking over the former dictator’s summer palace from his heirs.
The statue in Melilla was removed when Spain was a failed military coup forty years ago by Guardia Civil officers loyal to Franco, who stormed parliament and fired shots over the heads of MPs preparing them for a new government to vote.
At a ceremony in parliament where the bullets fired exactly four decades ago are still visible, King Felipe VI testified to those involved in the putsch strike that ultimately resulted in the “triumph of democracy”.
“Spain had an extremely serious attack on its democratic system forty years ago today,” the king told parliament, cheering that his father had intervened in a crisis that took place when he was just 13 years old.
Former King Juan Carlos, who resigned in 2014, was not present at the ceremony, despite his important role in thwarting the coup. He went into self-imposed exile last year after increasingly having questions about the origins of his fortune.
But the coup went awry after the decisive reaction of Juan Carlos, who held a televised speech in uniform as commander-in-chief who called on the army not to support the uprising.
In an editorial, El Mundo said that Juan Carlos’ absence “due to his own reprehensible mistakes, should not affect the brilliant role he played”.
“He has stopped the coup and democracy has been strengthened to the point that it is one of the best in the west,” he added.