The ghosts of Spain’s troubled past have begun to stir as the Socialist Government pushes a controversial Bill designed to honour the victims of General Franco’s four-decade dictatorship.

The Bill sparked an uproar in parliament by Spain’s conservative opposition yesterday, which claimed that it merely reopened the wounds of the civil war of 1936-39. Even the Republican Left of Catalonia Party, a partner of the Government, dismissed the draft law as an amnesty that would “allow the crimes of Franco’s regime to go unpunished”. It threatened to challenge the law in international courts.

Spain’s relatively peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s was long held up as a model for other countries to follow. However, the “Law of Historic Memory” was one of the key pledges of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Prime Minister, when he came to power in 2004, an effort to redress the grievances of those forgotten during the country’s headlong charge to democracy.

Right-wing Spaniards accuse Mr Zapatero — whose own grandfather was killed by a firing squad during the civil war — of acting out of vengeance. Mariano Rajoy, the leader of the conservative Popular Party, said: “The only thing the law will create is problems and division. Why do we need to create problems . . . where there were none?”

The Government appears to have enough support from small parties to ensure that the Bill will pass a vote next Thursday. Though not completely finalised, the new law should enable the families of Spaniards sentenced by Franco’s courts to have those rulings overturned. It looks set to declare summary judgments by Franco’s tribunals to be illegitimate — though it will not automatically annul them, as left-of- centre parties had demanded.

“I think it is good news,” said Emílio Silva, whose grandfather was killed by death squads allied with Franco’s side in the civil war and buried in a mass grave. “The debate it is producing in Spanish society is also tremendously important.”

The new law should provide state funds to exhume the dozens of mass graves dotted around Spain and give victims a proper burial. The task has so far been undertaken privately by groups of relatives, such as Mr Silva’s Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory. It also looks set to order the removal of symbols left over from Franco’s regime — which lasted until his death in 1975 — such as the many streets and plazas still named after the dictator. One of the last remaining public statues of the Generalissimo, astride his horse in a square in Salamanca, will be removed next May, local authorites said this week. But the Government ducked the thorny issue of what to do with the Valley of the Fallen, the vast complex outside Madrid where Franco’s body lies. It has merely banned admirers from using the site to glorify his regime.

“This law intends to reinterpret history and turn the conflict . . . into a movie, with goodies and baddies,” El Mundo newspaper wrote in an editorial. “It is a sectarian and partisan initiative that interprets that tragedy according to the viewpoint of only one of the two sides in the battle.”

Rule of the Right

36 years Franco was in power in Spain

50,000 suspected Republicans executed

250,000 went into permanent exile

47% of Spanish voters backed the Republicans in the 1936 election, compared with 46 per cent who backed Franco's Nationalists

Source: The Spanish Civil War, by Frances Lannon

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