The cynicism of deploring a dictatorship from 50 years ago while destroying a democracy

On November 20, 1975, many Spaniards woke up to the news of the death of Francisco Franco Bahamonde.

Six Spanish political parties support dictatorships, and all six are left-wing
Pedro Sánchez's antidemocratic international and his friendly photos with dictators

The death of the Ferrol-born general gave way to a transition to democracy in which the leaders of the dictatorship themselves laid the foundations for the political change that ended it. Half a century later, Pedro Sánchez's coalition government of socialists and communists is trying to capitalize on that anniversary by presenting itself as the antithesis of the dictatorship, and two years after it proclaimed itself a "wall" against the far right, while that government supports dictatorships much worse than Franco's.

Certainly, there are some walls that are built not to protect the people who live behind them, but to imprison them. The communist dictatorship of East Germany called the Berlin Wall an "anti-fascist protection wall," in a cynical attempt to make the inhabitants of that anti-democratic regime believe that the villains of the story were on the other side. To complete the deception, that dictatorship called itself the "German Democratic Republic." Many spent years using the expression "democratic Germany" to refer to a brutal dictatorship that murdered those who tried to flee. In reality, the democratic and free Germany was the one in the west.

In Spain, the left is committing a very similar deception. Spanish socialists and communists label their rivals as "fascists" and "far-right", making people believe that the true democrats are those who belong to the left, and trying to convince us that socialists and communists fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War, when in reality they turned the Republican side into a dictatorship in which tens of thousands of people, including children, were murdered for political reasons.

With the same cynicism, while deploring a dictatorship from 50 years ago, Pedro Sánchez's government is destroying democracy in Spain, attacking the most basic pillars of this system of freedoms in order to perpetuate itself in power. Since Sánchez came to power, his obsession has been to seize control of the judiciary, promoting attacks on judges and openly anti-democratic reforms that violate one of the foundations of democracy: judicial independence. Spanish socialism has never believed in this independence, because it believes that "democratic" means politicians choosing the judges who should curb their abuses of power.

This authoritarian attitude led Sánchez a year ago to announce that he would govern without legislative power in case he did not have the support of a majority in Congress, after having lost the last general elections and having achieved re-election through a corruption operation that consisted of granting criminal privileges to his allies in exchange for their support. An infamous exchange of favors with which this government has attacked another of the pillars of democracy: the equality of citizens before the law.

Furthermore, with his government mired in serious corruption scandals, last year Sánchez announced a measure to limit press freedom that imitates Putin's dictatorship. A few months later, and as part of the same authoritarian drift, Sánchez launched a campaign to promote censorship on social media, a major information channel that he does not control and which has become one of the main avenues for denouncing the abuses of his government.

Given his despotic attitudes, it is becoming increasingly clear that Sánchez detests Francisco Franco not because he was a dictator, but because he wasn't a communist dictator. If the Ferrol-born general had declared his adherence to Marxism-Leninism and his regime's support for the USSR, we would see a very different attitude towards him from the Spanish left today. Keep in mind that Sánchez has maintained cordial relations with communist dictatorships like Cuba and China, never once criticizing them for their attacks on basic human rights.

Along the same lines, four years ago Sánchez, his party, and his allies voted against the European resolution condemning the crimes of communism, making it clear that his discourse about defending democracy and human rights is as cynical as that German communist dictatorship which had the nerve to proclaim itself a "democratic republic" despite being a one-party regime, without free elections, and which did not respect the most basic freedoms and rights. With a government that does not condemn the death of 100 million people at the hands of communism, what should worry Spaniards is not a dictatorship that ended 50 years ago, but the one that Sánchez and his allies are starting now.

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Photo: PSOE.