Heirs without will

C.588 (10-21-1976).

Presentation of Alianza Popular to the press on October 21, 1976. From left to right, Enrique Thomas de Carranza, Licinio de la Fuente, Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora, Manuel Fraga, Laureano López Rodó, Federico Silva Muñoz and Cruz Martínez Esteruelas. MARISA FLOREZ

The definitions that the Dictionary

offers us

about the word “heir” do not include its figurative meaning, unlike what happens with other words whose metaphorical meaning has become more established, to the point of even losing its primitive rhetorical intention.

When someone says that they are going to the mountains, no one sees the carpenter's instrument designated in that sentence, but rather a mountain range that, yes, represents the toothed profile that originally served to establish the analogy and expand that initial meaning.

With “heir”, on the contrary, there does not seem to have yet been the academic fixation of a new stable meaning that perhaps is deduced in “inherit” (“receive something corresponding to a previous situation”).

But it must be falling.

An heir is one who “by will or by law, succeeds to an inheritance” or who “takes or holds the property of his parents.”

And that's it.

We do not find there the reflection of a figurative inheritance like the one that abounds today: “those from Bildu are heirs of ETA.”

The language of politics has that: that more is thrown than offered.

And that throwing of words makes the attackers believe that this is how they get rid of them.

However, we are all metaphorical heirs of something or someone, and so is the right.

Alianza Popular (Popular Party since 1989) was promoted in October 1976 – a year after Franco's death – by Manuel Fraga and six other former ministers of the dictatorship.

Two of them, members of his last Government;

and three, like Fraga himself, were part of the councils that validated death sentences handed down after summary trials without guarantees, among them those of the communist Julián Grimau and the anarchist Salvador Puig Antich, as well as ETA terrorists.

Many who held positions at that stage joined the ranks of that new party, while others, such as Pío Cabanillas and Rodolfo Martín Villa, chose the Union of the Democratic Center (UCD), the group of whom would be a great promoter of democracy: Adolfo Suárez, who in turn had served under Franco's leadership as civil governor of Segovia, as director of TVE (without competition at the time) and as deputy secretary general of the Movement, the single party.

Can we consider Fraga, the PP or Suárez heirs of Franco and the dictatorship?

In a way, yes.

But in a way, mostly not.

All of them broke with their past and dedicated themselves to drafting the 1978 Constitution from their respective right-wing and center positions, in joint action with the socialists, communists and nationalists whom they had previously persecuted.

For decades, democratic Spain demanded that ETA abandon murderous weapons, arguing that the independence movement could be defended through words.

This is how it finally happened.

And ruling 62/2011 of the Constitutional Court indicates that Bildu was established by two parties that “have repeatedly condemned and continue to condemn ETA's violence,” although a solemn update in this regard could still be desired, just as it can be missed in the PP against Francoism and we do not even expect it in Vox.

But even with the obvious differences between the three cases, and with all the nuances that are left out of these brief lines, a thread unites Bildu and the PP as supposed legatees: they renounced their will and fulfilled what democracy needed.

Throwing the word “heirs” at them is equivalent to locking them in the past;

but one also leaves the past.

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