Friday, March 29

Abascal glosses Primo de Rivera to the applause of the public at a Vox rally

The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, has taken advantage of his intervention in the kind of festival that Vox organizes this weekend in Madrid, with far-right leaders from several countries, to claim a few words from the founder of the Falange José Antonio Primo de Rivera. “They go around saying they want to remove the body of José Antonio Primo de Rivera,” he said on stage. A man who, before being shot, said a few words that can offend no one: ‘I wish mine were the last Spanish blood spilled in civil discord’”.

Abascal has recovered the words of the Falangist leader, tried by the Government of the Republic for uprising and shot on November 20, 1936, to attack those who, he said, “want to start desecrating graves again” and “unearth hatred”. Although he has not named anyone specifically when speaking on this point, Abascal has referred to those who have “again” a “profane mania”, in alleged reference to the Government and its parliamentary partners who this week gave the definitive green light with their votes to the Democratic Memory Law.

With this new law, the remains of the Falangist leader should go from the main altar of the Valle de los Caídos basilica, where they are now, to the common crypts. That movement would be, for Abascal, a way to “unearth hatred to generate tension” by those who “do not love” the homeland and “do not think about love between Spaniards.” If the exhumation of Primo de Rivera materializes, his remains will complete a long journey in just under a century: he was buried in a mass grave in Alicante; the National side removed it from there in 1939 and moved it to the El Escorial Monastery; and in 1959, Franco exhumed him again and buried him in the Valley of the Fallen, just one day before the inauguration of that mausoleum.

This Saturday, in addition to glossing the Falangist leader, he boasted about the history of his country that he and his followers, he said, assume “without gag, without fear and with pride.” “We assume the past without hemiplegia [parálisis total o parcial de un lado del cuerpo], without black legends and neither roses. We assume our history without gag, without fear and with pride. They are not going to take away the victories or the defeats from which we have learned so much”, he said, and then defended the statues that these vague people “want to throw down”: “We want to raise them when necessary”.

Those demolished statues could be those of Christopher Columbus in some countries of America, thrown away as a way of resignifying the so-called “conquest”, but also, given their lack of definition and the mentions of the Falangist leader, those of Franco and other members of his Government withdrawn in the last decades effect of the Law of Historical Memory.

Finally, the leader of Vox defended the nation “as a handle for those who have nothing.” “They want to destroy our heritage, especially that of those who have the least. They want to destroy the nation, the protection of the weakest, the support of those who have nothing and are experiencing worse”, he has said. “We have a duty to be grateful, everything we have is inherited, nothing belongs to us, we are its trustees, testamentary executors of a legacy that we will have to deliver improved to future generations”, without clarifying whether part of that legacy is also made up of the ideas of José Antonio Primo de Rivera.

Meloni, Morawiecki or Milei, among the guests

Abascal’s speech was the highlight of Saturday’s Viva 22 festival, an event organized by Vox in the Mad Cool space in Madrid under the motto “The History we made together”, and in which they also participated yesterday far-right leaders from other countries such as the Argentinian Javier Milei, who calls himself an anarcho-capitalist and just a few weeks ago questioned the numbers of disappeared persons from the last military dictatorship in his country; or André Ventura, the leader of the far-right Portuguese Chega party.

However, the headliners of the festival will intervene this afternoon: Giorgia Meloni, winner of the last elections in Italy, and the Polish Prime Minister Mateus Morawiecki.





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