It is now 50 years since the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, a fact that reminds us that authoritarian regimes do not disappear through simple decline, nor do they cede power of their own volition.
What we call democracy today is the result of decades of silent pressure, collective organisation and clandestine resistance.
From the 1960s onwards, cracks in the dictatorship were opening up from the factories, in the most forgotten neighbourhoods, in the most grassroots parishes, in the courage of so many teachers, in the universities or in the corners where it was possible to speak freely, far from surveillance and repression.
And in this collective legacy we also find the young Pasqual Maragall, who began to get involved in the anti-Franco struggle when he was still a 17-year-old teenager.
His journey during those years—detailed in the Chronology of the Pasqual Maragall Digital Archive—shows a young man fully immersing himself in a country that is beginning to awaken. At the University of Barcelona, he becomes involved in a student movement that is increasingly active and aware of the need to shatter the regime's oppression. He participates in the evolution of the NEU (Nova Esquerra Universitària - New University Left), which becomes a space for debate and political organisation with a desire for real transformation, and he also gets involved in the FOC (Front Obrer de Catalunya - Workers' Front of Catalonia) federated with the FLP (Frente de Liberación Popular - Popular Liberation Front), known as "Felipe". He does so alongside Jose Ignacio Urenda and other young university students and workers, with whom he later collaborated throughout his life, such as Daniel Cando, Josep Maria Vegara, Narcís Serra, and Ernest Maragall himself.
These are years of political agitation, and anti-Francoism is being structured into parties and movements that organise and disappear. After the dissolution of the FOC in 1974, Maragall participates in the creation of CSC (Convergència Socialista de Catalunya - Socialist Convergence of Catalonia), which later participates in the unity congress where the PSC (Partit Socialista de Catalunya - Socialist Party of Catalonia) is created.
With the first democratic elections in the town councils in 1979, he takes the step towards the institutions with a clear idea: democracy must become tangible, especially in the cities, which are the first ground where daily life changes.
From here begins another journey, that of the democratic, modern, and open Barcelona that Maragall would help to build as a councillor and later as mayor. But that city project cannot be understood without the previous years: the years of clandestinity, of shared readings, of complicity, of audacity, which forged his way of understanding politics as a rigorous and at the same time profoundly human public service.
Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of the dictatorship is not looking back with nostalgia, but recognising the collective force that made change possible. A force made up of thousands of stories, anonymous and well-known, among which Pasqual Maragall's is just one more.
Today we remember the death of a dictator with the conviction that democracy is not a fixed scenario, but is built, defended, and renewed in each generation as a result of collective will.
