Memory cannot be repealed
On the 10th, the Balearic Islands Parliament repealed the Democratic Memory Law with votes from the People's Party and Vox. It is undoubtedly one of the saddest days in our recent history, because this decision stems not from consensus or historical rigor, but from the government's submission to the demands of the far right.
I say this with sadness, not anger. Sadness at seeing how a part of our democracy is regressing and how the People's Party has ended up bowing to Vox's demands to repeal a law that had such a basic objective as to dignify the victims and strengthen the democratic quality of our institutions.
The repeal has been justified with arguments that are repeated time and again: that the law was partisan, that it only commemorated certain victims, and that it served to reopen old wounds. But all these arguments are based on a false premise that needs to be debunked.
The first issue is how the origin of the conflict is explained. The Civil War is often presented as an inevitable tragedy, a kind of violence between equal sides who clashed on equal footing. But the story doesn't begin there. In Spain, there was a democratically elected government, the Second Republic, which had emerged from elections and was legitimate in the eyes of the citizenry. What happened in 1936 was not a simple conflict between equals: it was a military coup against a democratic regime. This is the true starting point. And from there, a war unfolded, followed by almost forty years of dictatorship.
Like all wars, the Civil War was a human disaster. There was violence, death, and injustice on both sides. But there is a fundamental difference that is often forgotten, or deliberately ignored: after the war, the Franco regime built a state that honored, commemorated, and dignified its dead. For decades, the victors received public recognition, monuments, tributes, and exhumations. Meanwhile, the defeated—those who defended republican democracy and legitimate institutions—were condemned to silence, mass graves, and oblivion, while Francoist repression continued for decades with imprisonment, persecution, and further executions.
This is the crucial difference that explains the existence of memory policies. It wasn't about rewriting history or enacting a partisan law. It was about rectifying a massive historical imbalance: the fact that thousands of people murdered by Francoist repression remained missing or without institutional recognition.
The Balearic Islands' democratic memory law—the one repealed by the Parliament last Tuesday—was not a law against anyone, nor was it a partisan law. It was a law that recognized ALL victims without exception, both those of the Civil War and those of the dictatorship, regardless of their political affiliation. Its democratic value lay precisely in this: recognizing the suffering of all and redressing a historical injustice that for decades had condemned only some of the victims to silence and oblivion.
The law allowed, among other things, the identification of missing persons, public recognition of the suffering of many families, and the incorporation of this part of our history into education and collective memory. It was not a law of revenge. It was a law of dignity.
That is why its repeal is so serious. Not only because of what it means for the victims and their families, but also because of the political message it sends. Repealing a law of democratic memory based on historical fallacies and simplistic arguments is not moving towards coexistence. On the contrary, it is reimposing silence on a part of our history.
And there is still one image that perfectly encapsulates what happened on Tuesday in the Balearic Parliament. During the debate on repealing the Democratic Memory Law, the President of the Balearic Government, Marga Prohens, was nowhere to be seen. She did not attend the debate, she did not listen to the victims or the arguments of the parliamentary groups. She only appeared at the end, at the moment of the vote, with a half-smile on her face. I don't know if that smile was a way of mocking the victims, her own word—because she herself had assured everyone that this law would not be repealed—or simply the citizens of these islands. What we do know is that this gesture perfectly symbolizes what happened: a government that refused to face a profoundly unjust decision and that preferred to bow to the demands of the far right rather than defend the dignity of the victims and the democratic integrity of our institutions.
Parliament can repeal a law, but it cannot erase memory. However much some may try to bury it in silence once again, democratic memory will remain alive in society, in families, and in all those who know that a dignified democracy is not built on forgetting, but on truth, justice, and recognition.
