The provincial headquarters of the conservatives (PP) must have choked on their morning coffee when it became known what one PP member had on his facebook account.

There could be no doubt who local party spokesman for Escúzar, Manuel Alférez Bonilla felt an affinity with: Generalisimo Francisco Franco, el Caudillo. The header image was a collection of images of the dictator himself, fascist-eagle and flag images, the whole ‘package.” Whoops!

The Spanish right-wing has bent over backwards to disassociate their 21st-Century image from the Franco regime that ruled Spain for nearly 40 years under Franco.

The trouble is that everybody knows where the radical left-wing enthusiasts went, which was the Spanish Communist Party, and when that went down the drain, the Izquierda Unida, which is a coalition. As for the radical right-wing, many ended up in the right-wing coalition party, Alianza Popular, which later did away with the ‘plural’ adjective and became the Partido Popular.

So, today you have the radical left in the IU, the centre left in the PSOE… and only the PP occupying the centre right and beyond, which is why it is no surprise when something like this crops up and why the provincial headquarters of the PP had a fit.

Not surprisingly, Granada got straight onto the phone with Escúzar and “asked him to remove immediately the photos and the pre-constitutional fascist symbols. Vice-Secretary, Ana Vanessa Garcia, strongly criticised “all kinds of pre-constitutional and fascist acts and manifestations.” Obviously referring to Sr. Alférez’s facebook account, she qualified this kind of behaviour as “disavowable & intolerable, and without place in a 21st-Century society.”

Until the Spanish right-wing splits into two parties, as the Spanish left wing did; one centre right and the other for the hard right, like this gentlemen, it is doubtful that the Partido Popular will ever throw off this problem.

(News: Escuzar, Poniente de Granada, Granada, andalucia)