The political use of commemorations: The myth of Azaña and the Suarez’s sacrifice

Abstract

The goal of this work is to take into account the figure of Manuel Azaña as a lieu de la memoire laying upon the conmmemorations of his birth and death, in 1980 and 1990, events which turned Azaña — reviled during the Francoist dictatorship — into an almost revered national icon. I will analyze the political use of Azaña in this context, particularly linked to the political quarrels to hold the political centre during the decade of socialist hegemony. This political use is not limited, as historiography has noted until now, to the partisan instrumentalization of that figure made by the new Partido Popular of Aznar at the beginning of the 90s. Tierno Galván and the former president Suárez have tried as weel to use Azaña’s memory. In the course of the conmmemorative decade, Suárez projected in a original way the comparison with Azaña and, once created the CDS, looked for to transform the new party in the banner of the so called neoazañismo, in other words, a new PSP made to mesure for him, being helped to fulfill that project by Morodo. The recognition of the figure of Azaña by Aznar is easy to understand along this path, trying to appropriate with decisiveness that political legacy from Suárez, once this was politically sacrified, as the latest stage of a series of iterative commemorative rituals.