Francisco Franco died on November 20, 1975 and at that time it was difficult to know what would happen in this country if democracy was finally achieved. Everything has been going on for 50 years, even a few more. At the end of June 1971, the Communist Party of Spain held a huge demonstration in Montreau Park, east of Paris. World of work, the organ of its Central Committee, reproduced the speech of its president, Dolores Ibárruri, on the 21st, The Passionflower. “The policy we support is not a clean slate policy, but it is not a revenge policy either,” he said at the time. “Let’s stop digging into the newly healed wounds and want to forget the resentments that injustice has accumulated in our conscience and in that of all those who suffered the criminal repression that decimated our country with Franco’s victory.” Reconciliation was the tone of the organization that had the most significance in the fight against the dictatorship.
“A glorious rally”, headlines World of workers. He then recalls that “around 50,000 Spaniards and thousands of French workers and democrats” gathered in that park in the city of Montreuil. It’s possible that the figure was a bit inflated, but there is literally not a pin in the published image. Pasionaria’s speech was interrupted several times by great applause. He began by thanking the help that France gave to the Republic in the summer of 1936, when Franco’s military coup took place, and then got into the topic. He wanted to talk about what would happen and in his speech he clearly explained that “a communist solution is not maturing in Spain, but a democratic change” which his party wants to support with all its strength.
The seventies were beginning and it is curious how Dolores Ibárruri at that time had no qualms about calling for democracy in Spain and at the same time celebrating a dictatorship, that of the Soviet Union. Make no mistake, he comments, “we are today, politically, what we were yesterday”. “And that there is no human or divine force,” he states, “that can separate us from our path, nor from our friendship with the Soviet Union, with the great socialist country, which is the fundamental factor of progress in the world today, a friendship which we extend and maintain to everyone and with all the countries that form the camp of socialism.”
Words, words, there is no way to imagine what La Pasionaria democracy had in mind, but whatever it was, the Communist Party pledged to fight for it, and along the way it had to make important concessions – like the rest of the forces that negotiated the changes. It is important to underline in his speech when he explains that his party must start in the development of its policies “not from abstract dogmatic formulations, but from the living and current reality of Spain”. Javier Pradera, who in many editorials written in this newspaper highlighted the enormous transformation that took place in those years to conquer democracy, writes in Corruption and politics (Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores): “That democracy uncompromising defended by both the right and the left, it brings democracies to the pyre existing in the name of democracies imaginary”. There are still those today who question democracy which, with all its defects and fragilities, was built after Franco’s death with the yardstick of a distant, chimerical and imaginative abstraction.
