Exhuming General Franco’s body a fortnight before tomorrow’s election could act as a metaphor for Spain’s political crisis. After the fascist’s death in 1975, Spain passed a constitution that steered it from dictatorship to modern democracy. “After that Spain had the best four decades for 300 years,” Salvador Illa Roca, manager of the Socialist Party’s campaign in Catalonia, said.
However, that consensus is being challenged and there are fears that the relative harmony of the post-Franco years may be ending as, like El Caudillo’s remains, the old pacts that held Spain together are being dug up and their status reassessed.
Mr Illa points to populism and the collapse of centrist parties in Europe as part of the reason for the upheaval, but others are
