The three history teachers of the same high school in the south of Madrid have been tormented for some years by the first year ESO students (12 years old) with the same recurring question: “And Franco, professor?” “When do we give it to Franco, professor?” The dictator who died exactly 50 years ago has become for many students of this center, according to these teachers, not only a historical figure who arouses growing interest, but also a flourishing sympathy. “Before, 15 years ago, there was the classy façade, which was the strange one, but now it is an almost general trend, especially among boys, not so much among girls. And they don’t hide when it comes to proclaiming it,” says teacher Dolores Chincolla, 56, with more than 30 years of experience teaching history to teenagers in a classroom in a public institution. This interest – and this admiration – translates into various things: bracelets with the Spanish flag and the motto “Arriba España!”, Franco’s calendars carried somewhat hidden in the pockets, playing with the metallophone during music lessons behind the teachers’ backs. Face to the sun or the request to connect in class to the live broadcast, in October 2019, of the exhumation of Franco’s body in the Valley of the Fallen. “I put it on, of course. Because it was interesting. But they never asked me to see anything else live,” says Mercedes Medina, 56, who is also a history teacher at the same center. A third colleague, David Campos, 29, adds that not infrequently, when he asks his ESO or high school students to choose a favorite historical figure, many choose the dictator: “And none of them choose Cervantes,” he adds with some sadness. Mercedes Medina adds, with the same sadness but with a certain caution in the tone of her voice: “It’s a trend. There were some years when Franco was dead, but now he is resurrected.” “The bad thing is that with this fashion, and at that age, they can be manipulated very easily,” says Pablo Juárez, professor of Language and Literature.
This does not only happen in this institute in Madrid, where these history teachers conspire, sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully (“when they get on the train it is difficult to get them off with arguments”), to show their students in class the true face of the dictatorship. The 40dB survey. created for EL PAÍS and Ser on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Franco’s death, it illustrates the way of thinking of the older brothers of these students. According to this survey, 23.6% of young people between 18 and 28 say that in certain circumstances a totalitarian regime may be preferable to a democracy. Respondents aged between 29 and 44 remained stable at 22.9%. In this, boys and girls do not think alike. This is also demonstrated by the latest CIS survey on the quality of democracy, dated April this year. According to this survey, 39.8% of 18-24 year olds do not believe that democracy is preferable to any form of government. And those aged 24 to 34 agree with a similar percentage: 35%. Among girls the figure drops significantly: to 14.1% among those under 24 years of age and to 27.8% among those between 24 and 34 years of age.
The political analyst and electoral strategist Antonio Gutiérrez-Rubí, who published a book entitled Polarization, society and algorithm. An x-ray of the new generations (Siglo XXI) assures that this tendency to get closer to Franco is due, in general, to three factors: dissatisfaction with the current situation, anti-system sentiment and the influence of social networks. “There is no cover-up of the figure of Franco, but a relativization. They do not justify torture or repression. But for some, Franco has stopped being a murderous dictator and has become a character defamed by a system in which they no longer have faith. Claiming him becomes another expression of rejection. It is a sort of nostalgia for a time they did not experience, which is why they idealize it. We must keep in mind that a lot of time has passed. Furthermore, the current era favors more extreme opinions. On social media network, especially on Tik-Tok, Franco is often described in short and simple videos as a good-natured boy who launched social security, who raised many swamps, etc. ” History professors from the Madrid institute agree. Mercedes Medina utters a bitter phrase from a group of vocational and conscientious professionals: “This generation is educated by Tik-Tok”. This social network, in which messages that soften the Franco dictatorship predominate, constitutes the information reference for 20% of children under 34 in Spain, according to the latest report by the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford, published in 2023.
To counter this, the historian, professor of pedagogy and for many years high school teacher Fernando Hernández Sánchez recently wrote the screenplay of a comic entitled Francofacts, which debunks the hoaxes about Francoism. “It is said that in 1953 we were made to pay for the house when in reality ration cards still existed. We must keep in mind that this is a generation that has taken it for granted that they will live worse than their parents and, perhaps, their grandparents, and this marks them. And that during the pandemic they locked themselves in the house and got used to watching everything through their cell phones.”
But then, beyond the studies and statistics, there is everyone’s opinion and life. That of Juan García, for example. He is 27 years old, born in Madrid, studied journalism and works in the hospitality and event organization sector. He comes from a happy and very political family where “there were a lot of arguments at home, on both sides”. He doesn’t hate Francoism; On the contrary: “The good outweighs the evil: he industrialized the country, he built many public works, he created the middle class and tourism. And now, I don’t know what we did to be so bad: there is nothing that makes life easier for workers or young people. It’s true that he used a strong hand, but this created a strong generation that now acts as an umbrella for us: if it weren’t for my parents, who go to the city and leave me their house in Madrid, I wouldn’t be able to become independent. With Franco, people went from the city to the city. Now go back to the city because you can’t live in the center because of the rents.”
Or that of Beltrán Arellanes, also 26 years old, who studies Contemporary History and works in his father’s bar: “I start from Marxist coordinates, and I grew up with the left of Pablo Iglesias and Monedero. But then that left disappointed us: it wasn’t going anywhere, it adapted and became the crutch of the PSOE. Here I see an ideological blindness, a constant need for a pact, and there is no progress, there are no solutions. Franco, with everything, has favored the interests of the working class. Otherwise, perhaps we should look at China, where the workers, the vast majority, own homes. The transition is very popular, but we have not experienced the transition. I was eight years old when the crisis broke out and I have lived through every crisis since.
Or that of a 26-year-old lawyer of Colombian origin, who arrived in Spain four years ago, a specialist in political philosophy, who prefers not to give his name for fear of harming the performance of his profession and who assures that he does not agree with liberal democracy because, in his opinion, “it protects individual or group interests and not the common good”. And he adds: “After all, this democracy, like the others in Europe, is controlled by a globalized economic oligarchy in transformation, by large technology companies, banks, vulture funds. Do you know why I am interested in finding alternatives to these liberal democracies? Because, in the future that awaits us, I will not have a pension, nor a house, nor a permanent job…”.
The three history teachers of this institution in the Community of Madrid try, with all the commitment they are capable of, to ensure that ideas like these do not take root. They know they are fighting against the tide, but sometimes they achieve small victories. “I once asked them to ask their parents and grandparents and, with the answers, to bring true stories of the Civil War and the post-war period told by those who lived them. There I felt that they understood that period,” recalls Professor Medina. But there are days when the authoritarian tide that overwhelms most of his students overwhelms them. And they get demoralized. Dolores Chincolla remembers the day she asked out of curiosity in an ESO class what they preferred, Athenian democracy or the dictatorship of Sparta. The worried grimace this teacher makes served as an answer.
