Franco’s exhumation could help decide the Spanish election

I was no sooner in Madrid than General Franco was exhumed from his mausoleum not far from El Escorial. An air force helicopter ferried his remains from the Valley of the Fallen, where a gigantic stone cross marks the dictator’s grave as well as that of 34,000 Spanish Civil War dead. For four decades the dictator had lain beneath a 1.5 ton granite slab. No longer. As eight of his descendants shouldered the coffin to the helicopter, shouts went up of ‘Viva España! Viva Franco!’ from Falangist diehards behind a police cordon. Franco was reinterred the same day alongside his wife, Carmen Polo, in a family pantheon 20 miles away. The exhumation was a symbolic triumph for Spain’s socialist government under Pedro Sánchez, which has long argued that the Valley of the Fallen glorifies the generalísimo at the expense of the thousands in unmarked graves from the 1936-39 war. The elimination of the last great symbol of Spain’s dictatorship may help to win votes for Sánchez in the general election on Sunday.