The now-forgotten Nobel Prize winner Camilo José Cela has announced in an unforgettable event that Spain is a woman with a missed period. I believe the claim of this extraordinary Galician writer, who, despite the risk of feminist frowns, not knowing how to completely escape the elephant traps set by the dictatorship, is lucky because our country is the only one in Europe for that. We did not experience a real bourgeois revolution that would enforce the value codes of the French Revolution, because our 19th century was an absolutist festival barely punctuated by a few temporary liberal turning points, and because in the 20th century the great nations saw the resurgent old regime from the military that emerged after the Second World War. we were cleaning up the still oozing bile of a gigantic civil war, of course provoked by the reactionaries against those who managed to bury it temporarily. and here he is bloodthirsty to rebuild a delay that takes much longer than anywhere else.
When Franco died in his bed in 1975, this country still retained many features of black Spain. Culture and the lack of incense went hand in hand until the end of the repression, no matter how much the military building had infiltrated the last decades of the dictatorship, and collective intelligence gradually made its way to save as much time as possible. loss. But when Pinochet attends caudillo’s funeral as the only head of state in the international community willing to honor the former dictator, only Political parties and trade unions banned in Spain and some founding laws were governed that defined an authoritarian monarchy but where there was no divorce, women could not work or open checking accounts without their husband’s permission, sex murders were considered honor crimes and generally deserved acquittal of the murderer. They were subjected to the dangerousness and social rehabilitation act of 1970, which replaced the vagrants and bandits act of 1933, and were therefore imprisoned; press and film censorship continued, etc.
Upon Franco’s death, the existence of two spains, although there is a fundamental difference from the past: both were willing to live together rather than try to destroy each other as they had so many other times. Peacefully, however, a struggle began for the modernization of the ancient country, which literally reproduced Ángel Ganivet’s beautiful diagnosis: “I sometimes believe that Spain’s two great powers are the one that pulls back and one that runs forward. because they did not want to understand each other, they were displaced and the neutral army of vultures tried to kill them by taking advantage of this incompatibility; And sometimes I think our country is not what it seems, and I think of comparing it to a genius guy who had the idea to put on a donkey mask to play a bad joke on his friends.”
The truth is, when the Transition started with substantial consensus, progressives got to work. In the days of the UCD, then-Justice Minister Francisco Fernández Ordóñez sponsored a divorce law that was approved in 1981 by some right-wing opposition (the Republic enacted it in 1932, but the dictatorship again outlawed it). UCD, the Episcopal Conference, and most of the media. The Right solemnly promised to abolish divorce when he came to power, but quickly forgot his promise.
Something similar happened with abortion. It was legalized in 1985 with González. It was fully liberalized in 2010 with Zapatero. There have been objections and protests from the right, but the law continues. The same thing happened with the same-sex marriage that Zapatero established in 2004… In any case, the right wing was overwhelmed and gave up. Sulzberger’s main idea came true when he said that Spain should be dragged into the 20th century by “kicking and screaming” (shouting and kicking).