The unexpected return to the past in Spanish political life over the past decade is arguably a tale of two actors: civil society – local groups “recovering historical memory” by exhuming remains from mass graves – and the courts – targeted by these groups to investigate evidence of crimes against humanity, most recently (and controversially) personified by Judge Baltasar Garzón. However, for a brief window in 2006-07, it appeared that a third actor, the governing Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), would wrest protagonism and lead Spain towards a legislative solution to the dilemma of how to confront the crimes of the Franco regime, ostensibly proscribed by a post-transition amnesty. Between July 2006 and December 2007, the PSOE government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero proposed, drafted and won parliamentary approval for what became known as the “Law of Historical Memory”; and yet immediately thereafter, the party distanced itself from its high public profile on this issue. This paper will analyze the vertiginous rise and precipitous fall of the PSOE’s “historical memory” agenda, arguing first, that the party overestimated the political space available for directly challenging the Transition’s pacted legal and symbolic limits; and second, that it underestimated the ability of the opposition center-right Popular Party (PP) to invoke fears of democratic de-consolidation in the electorate. The paper analyzes the evolution of the text of the Law of Historical Memory as emblematic of how the Socialist party lost control of the agenda and thus ceded protagonism to civil society and the courts.
