MADRID - Spain will on Thursday exhume the remains of dictator Francisco Franco from a grandiose state mausoleum near Madrid and relocate them to a more discreet grave in a country still conflicted over his decades-long regime.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has made moving the remains of "El Caudillo" (The Leader) a priority since coming to power in June 2018, arguing Spain should not "continue to glorify" a man who ruled with an iron fist after the bloody 1936-39 civil war that his Nationalist forces won.
"It is a great victory for dignity, memory, justice and reparation, and therefore of Spanish democracy," said the premier, who is gearing up for a general election on November 10.
The exhumation operation, 44 years after Franco died, is to begin at 10:30 am (0830 GMT) with only Franco's relatives and some government officials allowed to attend. The media is to witness it from outside.
The dictator's remains will be transferred by helicopter, weather permitting, from an imposing basilica carved into a mountain in the Valley of the Fallen, 50 kilometres (30 miles) from Madrid, to the Mingorrubio El Pardo state cemetery north of the Spanish capital where his wife rests.
Initially scheduled for June 2018, the operation was delayed by more than a year owing to a string of court objections by Franco's descendants.
Critics on both the left and the right have accused Sanchez of electioneering ahead of next month's vote, with the head of far-left party Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, saying the Socialist premier was unearthing "Franco's mummy" to win votes.
Spaniards are divided over the exhumation, with 43 percent in favour of the move and 32.5 percent against, and the rest undecided, according to a poll published earlier this month in daily newspaper El Mundo.
- Daily flowers -
Built by Franco's regime between 1941 and 1959 –- in part by the forced labour of political prisoners –- the Valley of the Fallen monument is one of Europe's largest mass graves, housing the remains of over 30,000 dead from both sides of the civil war, which was triggered by Franco's rebellion against an elected Republican government.
Most had fought for Franco but the monument also contains the bones of many Republican opponents who were moved there from cemeteries and mass graves across the country without their families being informed.
A 150-metre (500-feet) cross towers over the site which Franco dedicated to "all the fallen" of the conflict in what he called a gesture of reconciliation.
Since Franco was buried there after his death in 1975, flowers have been placed daily on his tomb.
Franco's descendants had staged a legal battle to stop the exhumation, or failing that, to have Franco's remains moved to a crypt at the Almudena cathedral in central Madrid where his daughter is buried.
The Francisco Franco Foundation, which defends the dictator's memory, had called for supporters to protest against the exhumation Thursday outside of the El Pardo cemetery, but local authorities banned the demonstration.
- 'Desecration' -
The government points out that in 2017, parliament approved a non-binding motion calling for Franco's remains to be removed from the Valley of the Fallen, but that it was ignored by the former conservative government of Mariano Rajoy.
Conservatives repeatedly accuse the left of opening wounds from the past with a so-called historical memory law, approved by a previous Socialist government in 2007, that condemns the Franco regime, orders the removal of its symbols and calls for the remains of bodies dumped into mass graves during the civil war to be identified.
Rajoy, who governed from 2011 until 2018, proudly said his government never gave any money to apply this law.
In an editorial published Wednesday, the conservative daily newspaper ABC called the planned exhumation a "desecration" of a grave.
"What will happen next?...Will neighbourhood churches burn as in 1936?" at the start of the civil war, the conservative head of Madrid's regional government, Isabel Diaz Ayuso, asked earlier this month.
