The past that never passes: the biopolitical instrumentalization of francoist trauma by vox and the crisis of spanish democracy (2008-2024)

Abstract

This article examines the biopolitical mechanisms through which the Vox party instrumentalizes the unresolved historical trauma of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975), as a central strategy for political mobilization in the context of the post-2008 economic-financial crisis. Starting from the assumption that the "pact of forgetting" of the Spanish democratic transition suspended and crystallized, rather than resolved, the collective trauma, it is argued that this freezing produced the structural conditions for the programmatic reactivation of authoritarian imaginaries. The investigation demonstrates that the Vox party does not offer a critical elaboration of the past, but rather its performative repetition, mobilizing emotional communities grounded in resentment, fear, and nostalgia. This operation reduces political life to its emotional dimension, a mechanism we characterize as "political bare life." The analysis of the authoritarian politicization of cultural heritage, exemplified by the "Concord Laws" and disputes over sites of memory, such as the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de Los Caídos) and the Paterna Cemetery, reveals how contemporary sovereignty is exercised through the normalization of authoritarian narratives in public space. By examining the transnational dimension of the phenomenon, through the circulation of memorial repertoires, it is shown that the instrumentalization of trauma is not a Spanish particularity, but a manifestation of a global biopolitical logic. Finally, it is concluded that Spanish democracy faces not only an institutional crisis, but a fundamental crisis of critical elaboration of the past, whose overcoming requires the construction of a functional memory based on truth, justice, and reparation.

Key words: historical memory; biopolitics; far-right; francoism; controversial heritage; political trauma.