REPORTAGE
The dictator Francisco Franco, who led Spain with an iron fist from 1939 until his death in 1975, was exhumed on Thursday of his monumental and reentered mausoleum near Madrid, 44 years after the end of a regime whose wounds are still not closed.
Arriving by helicopter at the cemetery of Mingorubbio, in the north of Madrid, his embalmed remains were reburied alongside his wife in this more discreet place where the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, assassinated in 1961, also rests.
Franco regime sympathizers gathered near the cemetery
Gathered near the cemetery, about 200 nostalgic of the regime sang the hymn of the fascist party of the Falange, pillar of the regime of the dictator who won the bloody Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) by making the fascist salvation, right arm extended in before. "It was an authoritarian regime yes, but we were much freer than today," said a sympathizer at the microphone of Europe 1, seeing in this exhumation "a profanation".
Shortly before 3 pm, the dictator's coffin came out of the imposing basilica carved into the rock of the "Valle de los Caidos" mausoleum, carried by eight members of his family, including his great-grandson Louis de Bourbon, a distant cousin of the King of Spain Felipe VI and considered by the Legitimists as the pretender to the throne of France. In Mingorubbio, was waiting for the former colonel Antonio Tejero, author in 1981 of an attempted coup d'etat in the Spanish Parliament, whose son then celebrated a religious office.
The end of a "moral affront", according to Pedro Sanchez
The Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez had made the transfer of the remains of the "Caudillo" a priority upon his accession to power in June 2018, so that this mausoleum, unparalleled in other countries of Western Europe, was led by dictators , can no longer be a "place of apology" of Francoism. This puts an end to a "moral affront" to an "anomaly for a European democracy", he said in a solemn address.
Promised for the summer of 2018, the operation was delayed by more than a year by the successive lawsuits of the dictator's descendants. With less than three weeks of legislative elections on November 10, critics of Pedro Sanchez, right and left, accuse him of making it an electoral argument, while a week of violent demonstrations in Catalonia have put the Socialist in trouble .