His only merit at work, warned Second Vice President Yolanda Díaz, was “violating and violating human rights and trampling democracy in our country.” The Council of Ministers has approved this Tuesday nine royal decrees that withdraw the respective Medals of Merit in Work awarded to Francisco Franco and other leaders who served as senior officials of the dictatorial regime.
The Minister of Labor herself has given an account of the Government’s agreement, and has announced that the medals are withdrawn, to begin with, “nothing more and nothing less” than Franco, in addition to José Luis Arrese y Magra, José León de Carranza Gómez -Pablos, José María Fernández-Ladreda and Menéndez Valdés, Francisco Franco Bahamonde, José Antonio Girón de Velasco, Enrique Plá and Deniel, Jesús Romeo Gorría, José Solís Ruiz and Juan Yagüe Blanco.
In the press conference after the Council meeting, the Second Vice President and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, stressed that “finally today the law of democratic memory is being complied with” and these medals are withdrawn.
“The distinctions for the Medal of Merit at Work are condensed in a so-called Golden Book that is, to a great extent, a Book of Infamy. It would suffice to go through its pages to verify, with astonishment, that we have taken too long to give this step”, they have highlighted from Work.
The revocation of these medals was announced by Díaz in October 2022, just six days after the entry into force of the Democratic Memory Law.
Last June, the Ministry of Labor began the process for the withdrawal of these medals with the publication in the Official State Gazette of the resolution to initiate proceedings.
The medal for merit at work is a decoration created in 1926 that disappeared during the Second Republic, and that was restored at the beginning of the Franco dictatorship by Decree of March 14, 1942, and whose regulation was later replaced by Decree 1817/1960, of September 21.
