The PP completes its pact with the left and prevents the repeal of the Balearic Law that remembers the victims of Franco’s regime

In an image that few imagined just a few weeks ago, the recent – and unprecedented – agreements reached by PP and left-wing groups in the Balearic Islands have become a reality this Tuesday in the Balearic Parliament. From its bench, an enraged Vox watched as the conservatives abstained during the vote on the proposal promoted by the extreme right to repeal the Autonomous Law of Democratic Memory, thereby enabling the continuity of a regulation that not only condemns the Franco dictatorship, but that also rejects any totalitarianism and undemocratic regime, promoting the recognition and guarantee of the rights to reparation, truth and justice of all victims of the civil war and the dictatorship Francoist

“Democracy is an achievement of citizens and, therefore, we must know where we come from, commemorate this achievement, spread its values ​​and preserve it in the face of the threats of totalitarianism that, in the past and present, surround it,” enacts a Law that, despite the efforts of the extreme right to see it struck down, will remain in force. The suppression of this regulation was included in the legislative agreement reached between the PP and the extreme right, by which those of Santiago Abascal committed to abstain from the investiture of the popular Marga Prohens as president of the Government, as this ended up happening.

The Law of Democratic Memory and Recognition of the Balearic Islands, approved during the first term of socialist Francina Armengol, has allowed institutions to investigate rights violations and determine the human cost of the 1936 coup d’état, the civil war and the dictatorship. Franco’s regime in the Balearic Islands: more than 2,000 victims murdered and more than 10,000 locked up in prison, to which are added those who suffered convictions and death sentences “manifestly unjust” – as the memorialist associations denounce – those who were extrajudicially executed and those who were the subject of forced disappearances on the islands, mainly in Mallorca, where Falangists, soldiers, civil authorities, right-wing clientelistic networks, chaplains and even relatives of the victims themselves began a perfectly planned and executed spiral of terror.

This Tuesday, the 25 PP deputies abstained during the vote on the Vox initiative, as they had committed to PSIB-PSOE, Unides Podem and the eco-sovereignty of Més. In exchange, these same groups have made it possible in the same plenary session to suppress the 34 amendments that the extreme right presented to the autonomous Decree Law of administrative simplification, and that the conservatives incorporated two weeks ago by mistake on November 26. The refusal of Abascal’s party to repeat the controversial vote plunged conservatives and the extreme right into a deep crisis that has led to the withdrawal of the 2025 Budget due to the lack of agreements and with the popular parties agreeing with the left on important measures such as the non-suppression of the Democratic Memory Law.

During his speech in the plenary session, the spokesperson for the PSIB-PSOE, Iago Negueruela, made a fervent defense of the regulations that remember the victims of Franco’s regime: “There is no marketing with memory. “Memory is not touched,” he proclaimed during his speech in the chamber, drawing applause from the rest of the left-wing forces on several occasions. The socialist parliamentarian thanked the memorial entities for persevering over the last year to demand that the text not be repealed. “If a mistake has led us to this – alluding to the vote on the 34 Vox amendments – do not make the mistake again of questioning this law or any of our pillars. Today, the ethics of this people have prevailed over the drifts of the right,” he celebrated.

For her part, Podem spokesperson, Cristina Gómez, has, however, recriminated the words that the PP has uttered on other occasions – and this same Tuesday in the mouth of the president of the Balearic Government, Marga Prohens: that the Memory Law It is “unavoidable” because the state regulations and those of Fosas already fulfill similar functions, and that the left is mired “in the debates of the past.” In this sense, Gómez has asserted that “disinterring the victims is the minimum of minimums”, as contemplated by the Law for the Recovery of Victims of the Civil War and Francoism – better known as the Graves Law -. As you have pointed out, the Memory Act goes further by establishing guarantees of non-repetition. “It is not a victory, be coherent and defend human rights,” he said, addressing the PP bench.

It should be remembered that the Autonomous Chamber took into consideration last June the proposal promoted by Vox to repeal the Law in a plenary session in which Gabriel Le Senne (Vox), president of the Parliament, destroyed a portrait of Aurora Picornell, a symbol of the anti-fascist fight and murdered by the coup plotters on Twelfth Night in 1937.