Overview
- Government-organized commemorations for the 20 November anniversary have drawn sharp attacks from right-wing parties and outlets, turning remembrance into a present-day political fight.
- Former king Juan Carlos I has not been invited to the official event, and his memoirs are due in early December, adding a new flashpoint around the Transition and the monarchy’s role.
- Cultural retrospectives have multiplied, with platforms like FlixOlé programming cycles on the Transition and historical memory and media features reconstructing Franco’s final weeks.
- Historian Julián Casanova stresses the dictatorship’s origins in the 1936 coup and its long repression, warns that current teaching is insufficient to counter false narratives, and urges explaining contested sites such as the Valle de los Caídos rather than recasting them.
- Declassified context resurfaces in coverage, including Henry Kissinger’s call for a conservative-guided, gradual transition and accounts of Franco’s funeral attended by figures such as Augusto Pinochet while most democratic leaders stayed away.