Ignacio Gordón has been mayor of Matillas (Guadalajara) for so long that he doesn't know how long. This retired worker from a cement company doubts whether he was appointed in 1972 or 1973. He is one of the five survivors of Francoism at the head of town halls, according to data from the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces (FEMP). They took the baton from dictator Francisco Franco while he was alive and all have far surpassed the already colossal tenure mark of the self-proclaimed Caudillo. They have been in office for 50 years or are close to reaching it, they belong to the PP and almost all of them are from emptied Spain. There are two who announce his presentation to the elections on May 28, many others are thinking about it and a fifth, with 51 years in office, has already announced his withdrawal.
"I'm going to introduce myself, yes. I have already said it in public. I have my granddaughter number two”, explains bluntly the most famous, controversial and bizarre of these five dinosaurs of Spanish municipal politics, Senén Pousa, mayor of Beade, Ourense. The councilwoman to whom she alludes has long been the candidate to star in the scandalous headline "A Francoist mayor leaves his position to his granddaughter." Perhaps he is the last Francoist mayor, as Pousa seems a firm candidate to be the last Mohican of the dictatorship.
In 2003, due to pressure from the party, he stopped organizing the mass that he promoted every November 20 on the anniversary of the death of the self-proclaimed Caudillo, which is what Franco is called in the sentence to return the pazo de Meirás to the State, now pending. of the Supreme Court. That Eucharist of 20-N had a point of gallery of horrors, in the generally cold autumn night of the O Ribeiro region. Inside the temple, a few nostalgic people from all over Galicia gathered, some dressed in the blue shirt of the Falange and belts. Outside, a few dozen young people from the radical Galician independence movement were protesting, separated abroad by a large police deployment, with many journalists present.
That show is over. But Pousa has others, such as having Cara al sol, the anthem of the Falange, or his authoritarian style, which has led to several resignations of PP councillors. What he maintains, even if it is in a declining trend, is the majority support of the residents, who in 2019 gave him 54% of the votes. Six years earlier, the City Hall building suffered a terrorist attack by Resistencia Galega.
With its only 372 inhabitants and its six square kilometers of surface, the beautiful Beade, full of the vineyards in which Pousa worked, is almost a megalopolis between the municipalities that still have the mayor appointed by the civil governor with Franco alive. They are all dwarfs in terms of population, especially Villarroya from La Rioja. Salvador Pérez, mayor since 1974, assures that his municipality has seven neighbors and not five as the National Institute of Statistics maintains. He is 76 years old. He says they named him, he comments, because he "was the youngest." He assures that he is going to appear for the twelfth time “because my people need me. I wouldn't care." The town hall is only open on Sundays, since the weekend is when the town comes to life.
"Democracy doesn't seem bad to me," says the mayor of Villarroya as a preamble to his nostalgic speech, as he complains that now in the countryside "everything is prohibited." “In the Franco regime, the one who worked and was a good person, nobody messed with him. Now the one who doesn't work is the one who lives best. We have foreigners who live on aid ”, he blurts out.
The PP of Alicante has already announced that José Luis Seguí Andrés, mayor of Almudaina since 1972, will stand for re-election. He, however, confesses "I'm not sure", announces that he will decide on the fly and justifies himself: "I have my years."
"I am very old. It's too many years. I may or may not introduce myself ”, he comments, in the same position as Seguí, Ignacio Gordón, the mayor of Matillas, Guadalajara. If Almudaina has 112 neighbors, according to the INE, Matillas has 103. Its mayor is 82 years old. "Here we are almost all older and the few youth that there are have their chores," he explains as a portrait of a very empty Spain. Faced with the provocative militancy, with a folkloric touch, of Pousa from Orense, Gordón considers that during the dictatorship there were "good, bad and regular" things. Among the positive ones appears the great topic, that of water, swamps. Among the refusals, he cites repression, although he qualifies that "two do not quarrel if one does not want to."
According to the Guadalajara Tribune, 90-year-old Manuel Martínez Manchón, mayor of Valdarachas since 1972, has already announced his retirement after half a century as mayor. Old age has been one of the factors reducing this phenomenon of survival of the dictatorship, which was considerable. For example, compared to the only one today, in 2005 there were 15 Francoist mayors in Galicia, one of them in the PSOE. Among those who fell at the polls, the case of Ricardo Díez stands out, who ruled Castillejo de Mesleón for 55 years, until in 2019 he was knocked down by a niece of the PSOE.
But, in plain sight, there is still municipal Francoism.
