The Spanish government proposes a new law on history

WHEN DEMOCRACY came to Spain in the late 1970s, it arrived through agreements between moderate supporters of the long dictatorship of Francisco Franco, the victor in the Spanish civil war, and a realistic democratic opposition. At their heart was an amnesty law and a broad understanding not to use the past as a political weapon—arrangements often misleadingly dubbed a “pact of forgetting”. This largely seamless transition was widely hailed as a success. But younger generations, mainly on the left, now worry that Spain never acknowledged the crimes of its past.