The remains of the fascist leader whose movement supported General Franco’s dictatorship were dug up and reburied on Monday, rekindling debate in Spain over its troubled past and angering far-right activists.

The Spanish government ordered the exhumation of the body of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange fascist movement, from his resting place in a huge mausoleum on a mountainside 40 miles from the capital Madrid. He was then reburied in the city cemetery as part of a private family ceremony.

The move, taken by a small group of sympathizers who chanted and gave fascist salutes, is part of an effort to prevent the glorification of the country’s totalitarian past that occurs when the far right seeks political breakthroughs across Europe.

This follows the exhumation of General Franco’s remains at the same location, formerly known as the Valley of the Fallen, in 2019, after he was originally buried there after his death in 1975. The site was built in part using forced labor as a commemoration of the fascist victory in the civil war, and for many, the site represents the horrors of the war and Franco’s subsequent dictatorship.

As with Franco’s re-internment, Monday’s move sparks hatred for Spain’s current far-right movement, which sees Primo de Rivera and Franco as nationalist heroes. Santiago Abascal, leader of the populist Vox party, accused the Spanish government of displacing a patriot who “gave his life for Spain”.

Party vice president Jorge Bujade tweeted: “If they don’t respect the dead, does anyone think they respect the living, the workers, the farmers, those who have a calling to serve Spain?”

Vox called for “win backSpain and offered to build a wall around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in northern Africa.

Vox became the country’s third largest political party after the 2019 national elections, with 3.6 million votes and 52 deputies in the Congress of Deputies, Spain’s lower house of parliament. Opinion polls show that the party remains the third most popular party, with about 15% of national support.

Under a new democratic memory law passed last year, the site officially reverted to its original name, Cuelgamuros Valley. The Spanish socialist government plans to turn the site into a tribute to the 500,000 people who died during the civil war that lasted from 1936 to 1939.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said when the law was passed in October that he would “pay the Spanish democracy’s debt to its past.”

The mausoleum, with its 500-foot spire and cross, was built in part by the labor of Republican prisoners on Franco’s orders.

Presidential minister Felix Bolanos told reporters in Barcelona on Friday: “No person or ideology that is reminiscent of a dictatorship should be honored or extolled there.”

“This is another step in changing the meaning of the valley.”

This will be the fifth time that the body of José Antonia de Rivera has been exhumed since he was shot by left-wing Republican executions in 1936, such is the intensity of the feeling for his final resting place.

Initially, his body was buried in two different mass graves in the city of Alicante on the southeast coast. Two years later, he was transported 311 miles to San Lorenzo de El Escorial near Madrid, where the Spanish royal family is traditionally buried. His body was moved to the Valley of the Fallen in 1959.

Primo de Rivera’s family said in a statement to local media that they will now move the remains to a cemetery in Madrid and have them reburied in a private ceremony.

He was the son of Miguel Primo de Rivera, who ruled Spain as dictator from 1923 to 1930.

Nazi Germany sent a delegation of Hitler Youth activists lay a wreath at his grave in 1943.

Long-standing plans are being made to allow people to access the crypts in the Mausoleum of Cuelgamuros, which are believed to contain the unidentified remains of 34,000 people, including many victims of the Franco regime.

Families fought for years for the right to identify the bodies of loved ones who died during the war and were presumably buried in the crypt.

Spain is one of many European countries that have faced their 20th-century history, including many countries gripped by historical debates about the extent of Nazi collaboration during the Holocaust.

Julius Ruiz, an expert on Spanish history at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, said Primo de Rivera’s legacy has been used by supporters and detractors alike to support contemporary political goals as regional elections are just around the corner in Spain.

“He didn’t play any role at all in the Civil War, he was in a Republican prison, and in fact, during the months he was alive, he advocated reconciliation, he talked about how people should unite, how the war was a tragedy” Ruiz told NBC. News.

“But, of course, the problem here is that whatever the actions of the man himself, he was used by Franco – and José Antonio did not particularly like him – as a symbol for the legitimization of his regime on the basis of a single party that was created. in 1937.”

Ruiz added that, with a few more figures from the Francoist regime yet to be dug up, this may not be the last moot point in Spain’s shaping of its “democratic memory.”