The great Franco revival circus

'Iwant to move to Switzerland." So announced one of my students - mid-twenties, degree freshly printed, employment history blanker than Aristotle's tabula rasa.

"Oh?" I asked. "Drawn by mountains? Neutrality? Chocolate?"

"No. They don't pay taxes there."

Now, I had heard many legends about Switzerland: that mowing the lawn on Sunday is treated as a crime against humanity and that standing up to pee after 10pm is an acoustic felony. But no taxes?

"The situation here is unlivable. We're suffering the worst government in 80 years." At this, my internal alarm bells began to ring. I sensed where we were going, backward, historically speaking, and without a seatbelt.

You see, in today's Spain, a curious myth has seeped into the groundwater: that "under Franco we lived better". Astonishingly, a chunk of Spaniards under 24 hold the view that a cheerless, censorious dictatorship, the political equivalent of poison ivy, was a golden age of prosperity and serenity.

It's a sort of reverse Disneyland: the older generations remember the repression, but the younger ones queue up for the roller coaster.

Why this retrograde romance?

Mostly because historical education has been treated like an illegitimate child: partially acknowledged but never invited to dinner. Most young people know more about the Romans than about the collapse of civil liberties under Paquito Rana. Nuance, that fragile bird, does not survive long on TikTok, where authoritarianism is now repackaged as a lifestyle aesthetic.

The economic frustration is real. A generation drowning in precarious jobs, unaffordable rent and the delightful prospect of living with their parents until cremation is understandably cranky. But the real conversation should be about - not the myth that life was "better under Franco", but why democracy still struggles to prove that it's better.

And into that discontent strolls the mythmaker: "Back then, at least there was stability." Ah yes... the stability of having your press censored and your politics outlawed. It's the kind of stability one finds in graveyards. To be fair, it's comforting to imagine that someone, somewhere had things under control. But the idea that a regime built on repression, firing squads and compulsory obedience was Spain's golden age requires the sort of imagination usually reserved for sociopaths and certain political parties.

History doesn't repeat, but it certainly hires a good impersonator. And in Spain, the impersonator has been busy convincing the young that the past was a banquet and the present a famine, when in fact the banquet consisted mostly of censorship, poverty, and girls being told their purpose was to find a husband to submit to.

If democracy seems messy, that's because it is. Freedom always is. Tyranny is much tidier, nothing clutters the public square like opposing opinions.

So back to Switzerland. Dreams of tax-less bliss, alpine calm and an escape from Spain's alleged apocalypse. I was tempted to tell him the truth: that in Switzerland, you can be fined for taking a selfie with a fish you plan to release back into the lake.

Imagine that, a nation so orderly it protects the emotional well-being of trout. Yet even there, he would still have to pay taxes. And even the fish have more rights than life under Franco.