MADRID: Spanish lawmakers on Thursday approved a decree by the Socialist government authorising the exhumation of late dictator Francisco Franco from a vast mausoleum near Madrid.

The sensitive decision to move Franco’s remains from the monument was approved by a vote of 172 in favour and two against.

There were 164 abstained votes, from the centrist Citizens party and the conservative Popular Party (PP).

Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who came to power in June after toppling his conservative predecessor amid a graft scandal, has made removing Franco’s remains from the grandiose monument in the Valle de los Caidos (Valley of the Fallen) one of his priorities.

“Justice. Memory. Dignity. Today Spain takes a historic step... today our democracy has become better,” Sanchez wrote on Twitter.

General Franco, who ruled Spain with an iron fist from the end of the 1936-39 civil war until his death in 1975, is buried in an imposing basilica carved into a mountain-face just 50 kilometres (30 miles) outside of Madrid.

Built by Franco’s regime between 1940 and 1959 — in part by the forced labour of political prisoners — the monument holds the remains of around 37,000 dead from both sides of the civil war, which was triggered by Franco’s rebellion against an elected Republican government.

Franco, whose Nationalist forces defeated the Republicans in the war, dedicated the site to “all the fallen” of the conflict in an attempt at reconciliation, but only two graves are marked — those of Franco and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the far-right Falangist party which supported Franco.

Published in Dawn, September 14th, 2018