Two surviving mayors of the Franco dictatorship in two very small municipalities of La Rioja and Castilla-La Mancha achieved re-election yesterday, with both absolute majorities. On the other hand, it was lost by the third person who presented himself after having taken the baton of command in the autocratic regime, Senén Pousa, from Beade, Ourense, whom the PP did not want on its list this time, so he attended as an independent . Pousa, the most scandalous of all these dinosaurs, for being a provocative supporter of Franco, took out a councilor from the seven at stake, so he dropped three, while he won the popular ones in a minority with his renewed candidate.
According to data from the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces (FEMP), there are currently five Francoist mayors in the more than 8,000 Spanish municipalities. Two of them decided to retire and not run in the elections. The first to announce it was Manuel Martínez Manchón, who has governed Valderachas, Guadalajara, since 1972 and is 90 years old. More complex was the case of José Luis Seguí, mayor of Almudaina, Alicante, since 1972.
The Popular Party, to which all these townspeople belong, with the exception of the recent forced departure of the Galician Senén Pousa, announced through its organization in Alicante the appointment of Seguí again as PP candidate. But he already commented in February that "I'm not sure about it." "I have my years" he explained. In the end he opted for withdrawal.
Who was also in a process of reflection at the beginning of the year was Ignacio Gordón, from Matillas, from the province of Guadalajara. He is 82 years old and has been in the position since 1972 or 1973, as he claims to be unclear. "I am very old. It's too many years. I may or may not introduce myself ”, he declared in February. After deciding to continue in this campaign, he confessed to the Cope network that he is not sure if he will be able to finish his term, although at the moment he is "mentally and physically capable."
In the La Rioja town of Villarroya, the mayor, Salvador Pérez, assures that he was appointed in 1974 "for being the youngest". At the age of 76, after having begun to be handpicked by the civil governor, he points out that he is running because "my people need me." Villarroya is the town that votes the fastest in Spain, in a few seconds, with its census of 7 voters. The other two with Francoist mayors who were running for re-election, Matillas and Beade have 84 and 326 registered, respectively.
Beade discovered these days the electoral intrigue, the result of the decision, already at the last minute, of the Popular Party of Ourense to do without Senén Poussa and present its own list. The disagreements that Pousa had with the leadership of his party went back a long way, but they had never prevented him from being a candidate. In 2003 they forced him to stop organizing the same one on November 20 in honor of Franco. And in the crises of those years between the PP of Ourense and that of Galicia, of Manuel Fraga, he always sided with the then president of the Xunta, also a survivor of Francoism, as the most genuine Minister of Information and Tourism of the dictatorship. .
Suddenly, after the decision of the PP, the lists multiplied in Beade. Pousa, with his new independent candidacy, loaded with relatives, collapsed resoundingly, bringing his 49-year career as mayor to a complete setback.
The phenomenon of survival of the Francoist elites is in its last stages, but it has been very long and complex. For example, in municipal elections in 1979, in Galicia 102 mayors were elected, out of a total of 312, who already held that position in 1973, in the last "renewal" of Franco's city councils, according to the exhaustive investigations of the professor of Political Science from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Guillermo Márquez Cruz. Of them, 63 were from the UCD, 15 from Alianza Popular and the rest from independent groups.
After the 1983 elections, 65 mayors of the 1973 “fifth” held their baton of command, a figure that dropped to 54 with the 1987 elections and to 43 with those of 1991.
Using the criteria that they had come to power until November 20, 1975, that is, that they had the baton of command when the self-proclaimed caudillo died, in 2005 there were still a dozen Francoist mayors in Galicia, one of them in the ranks of the PSOE , Manuel Belón, from Cervantes, in the Os Ancares mountains of Lugo. Three stood in the 2015 elections, all from Ourense, Senén Pousa de Beade, Manuel Gallego from Taboadela and Pilar Otilia López, from Ramirás.
She, who replaced her brother and was forced to take the oath before the cross, on her knees, in the Civil Government of Ourense, was the only one who bit the dust then. Manuel Gallego decided to retire in 2019 and only Senén Pousa, from Beade, remained.
The last bit still pending from the local transition, 44 years after the first democratic municipal elections, is being resolved above all by biology, as shown by the cases of Valderachas and Almudaina, with their paths withdrawn, for reasons of age, from dinosaurs who held the mayor's office.
