After Spain’s first fully fledged modern democracy and Second Republic began in 1931 despite ferocious opposition from hardline conservatives, Franco began a right-wing military rebellion on July 18, 1936, to put an end to its political and social reforms.
Despite backing from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, his uprising encountered greater resistance than expected from a makeshift pro-Republican coalition of left-wing trade unionists, political parties, some parts of the armed forces and pro-democracy activists, leading to a full-scale, brutal Civil War lasting three years.
The republic finally surrendered on April 2, 1939, leading to his regime.
Since the earliest days of the war, a brutal repression of suspected civilian rivals and their families had begun in the Franco-controlled areas of Spain. It was designed to silence and intimidate any possible opposition.
The number of victims who were summarily executed is estimated at 130,000 to 200,000.
In the half-century since Franco’s demise, exhumations have been slow and beset by logistical, financial and legal challenges. There are an estimated 6,000 unmarked mass graves dotted around the country, including everywhere from wells and woodlands to gardens, cemeteries and remote hillsides.
But as Spain remembers the era’s victims and analyses exhumation efforts, it is grappling with the steady recent rise of a far-right party, Vox, and nostalgia for the ideals of the dictatorship among young people who did not endure it.
A recent CIS poll suggested that 20 percent of those aged 18 to 24 believed the dictatorship was “good” or “very good”.
According to secondary schoolteachers, social media is driving pro-Franco support among teenagers.
“They talk like they are really in favour of the dictatorship and of obligatory military service as well,” Jose Garcia Vico, a secondary school economics teacher in Andalusia, told Al Jazeera.
“The majority of the teachers I know are very worried because even if we’ve explained the difference between dictatorship and democracy, the students are so overrun with content from TikTok and they’re so p***** off with the world in general, they don’t know what they want.”
“The content they get from the hard-right parties on social media aimed at adolescents is considerable, and it has a lot of effect on how they relate to each other.”
While emphasising “not everybody in the class” is attracted to the far right, Garcia Vico points to a parallel sharp rise in Islamophobic and anti-transgender comments.
“Above all, it’s the boys who feel superior to the rest. But it’s a problem which involves some of the parents as well. A couple of years ago, some parents told me that it was OK that their child had interrupted me by shouting, ‘Viva Franco!’ [‘Long Live Franco!’] because that was freedom of expression.”
Hundreds of kilometres north in the capital, Madrid, Sebastian Reyes Turner, a 27-year-old teacher, said he has also noticed the impact of hard-right social media influencers.
“In schools, people only see Franco’s dictatorship as one of several topics to mindlessly memorise to pass a history exam they don’t really care about to begin with.
“On the other hand, details are cherry-picked by the far right to make them think it was a better time in which they didn’t face problems like they do today – like how hard it is to find jobs even if they’ve been studying well into their 20s or the housing crisis.”
