CARLA ANTONELLI REMEMBERS when being gay in Spain could get you sent to a work camp.
Under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, the LGBTQ+ community was harshly persecuted by authorities and forced to live in the shadows, recalled Antonelli, a 63-year old actress, activist, politician and transgender woman. Even after the dictator’s death in 1975, she would “routinely be arrested and beaten by police.”
“They’d smash my face against the wall until I lay in a puddle of my own blood, and then they’d laugh and say, ‘Just try and report me, f*ggot,’” said Antonelli.
Then something changed. Since the beginning of the century, Spain has galloped ahead when it comes to progressive policies. The once-conservative Catholic country, known around the world as the birthplace of machismo, embraced Scandinavian-style legislation promoting the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people.
In 2005, Spain became the third European country to legalize marriage equality and the second to allow adoption by same-sex couples. At the same time, Spaniards took on sexism by adopting one of the world’s most advanced set of laws on gender equality and violence against women.
Legislation drove those watershed changes, but public attitudes followed.
A 2021 survey by the market research company YouGov found Spain to be the most accepting of LGBTQ+ people in the eight countries it polled, with 91 percent saying they’d be supportive if a family member came out as gay or bisexual, and 87 percent saying they’d feel the same if the person were transgender or nonbinary. In liberal Sweden by contrast, the numbers were 77 and 73 percent. Madrid’s pride parade, which takes place this Saturday, is the largest in Europe.
Similarly, a 2023 Ipsos poll revealed Spanish society to be deeply sensitive to issues like violence against women and gender equality, with more than half of the population defining itself as feminist.
“We came from a dark, gray dictatorship, and the hunger for liberty is something with which everyone can empathize,” said Uge Sangil, president of FELGTBI+, Spain’s federation of LGBTQ+ organizations. “It also helps that we’re a fiercely loyal people: We’ll fight to the death for our loved ones — and everyone has a loved one who is a member of this community.”
Spain’s continued status as a progressive bastion is however by no means guaranteed: Activists are warning that if the country swings right, as it is projected to do in the upcoming July 23 national elections, the new government — possibly composed of conservatives and the far right — could attempt to undo achievements of the recent past.
“We need to get organized to vote now,” said Sangil. “But we also need to be prepared to mobilize to take a stand against every attack on our community.”
The Zapatero effect
THE END OF FRANCO’S DICTATORSHIP opened the way to new demands for civil liberties in Spain. But the breakthrough moment for women and the LGBTQ+ community didn’t come until the 2004 election, when socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero put equal rights at the center of his campaign.
The country, it seemed, was ready.
Throughout the 90s, LGBTQ+ people fought for visibility and a seat at the table. “In the U.S., those demands were driven by the AIDS crisis — but in Spain it was different,” Antonelli said. “People like Pedro Zerolo [a leading LGBTQ+ activist who died in 2015] spurred us to become conscious of our political power.”
For women’s rights groups, the major catalyst came in 1997, when a 60-year old Andalusian woman named Ana Orantes appeared on a regional television chat show and broke a decades-long taboo by speaking openly about the years of physical abuse she had suffered at the hands of her ex-husband.
Two weeks after Orantes described how she had been forced to endure “beating after beating, one day after another,” her ex-husband appeared at her house, doused her with gasoline and burned her to death.
“What happened to Ana Orantes echoed through all of society,” said Ángeles Carmona, president of Spain’s Observatory against Domestic and Gender Violence. “It challenged the idea that this kind of violence was a relationship issue, a private problem: By being exposed in such a brutal way, society woke up to the fact that it had a responsibility to address these situations.”
Immediately after taking office, Zapatero passed a comprehensive law on gender-based violence, the first to explicitly recognize that women deserve special protection because they are exposed to violence “for the very fact of being women.”
Following the reform, the number of femicides in Spain dropped from 71 in 2003 to 49 in 2022. Provisions in the legislation have ensured that every one of those murders has been analyzed to determine how the state can better protect women.
“Generations of Spanish women have demonstrated that they don’t want a traditionalist society in which we have no public, economic or political empowerment,” said María Soleto, president of Fundación Mujeres, the country’s leading feminist nongovernmental organization. “And we’ve had the good fortune of having some governments that have been committed to making that change possible.”
Carmona noted that Madrid’s efforts were inadvertently celebrated in the Council of Europe’s 2011 Istanbul Convention on the prevention of violence against women. “When it came time for Spain to ratify it, we discovered that the text basically copied our law,” said Carmona. “It was the most fantastic international endorsement of our work.”
Coalition chaos
SPAIN’S CURRENT GOVERNMENT — a left-leaning coalition led by socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez — has striven to keep the country’s progressive drive going, but controversy surrounding two of its signature pieces of legislation has undermined its support.
Last year’s sexual freedom law championed by the coalition’s junior partner, the far-left Podemos party, was applauded for its reinforcement of consent laws. But it also included a redefinition of sexual aggression that created a loophole slashing jail time for some convicted rapists.
Despite the reduction of more than 1,000 sentences and the release of more than 100 criminals — among them, a man with 17 rape convictions — Spain’s Minister of Equality, Podemos politician Irene Montero, refused to acknowledge that there were flaws in the bill’s text and instead blamed “sexist judges” for manipulating the legislation.
The accusation incensed Spain’s judiciary — including Carmona of Observatory against Domestic and Gender Violence, who also serves on one of the country’s special courts for gender-based violence. She said the affair revealed a “lack of humility” within the government.
“Those attacks put the credibility of the entire Spanish Judiciary — the branch that has worked so hard to guarantee equality for the past two decades — in doubt,” she said.
A spokesperson for Montero rejected the criticism, and said the Ministry of Equality was not responsible for technical errors in the law.
Public outrage eventually obliged Sánchez to sidestep coalition partners, make a deal with the opposition to reform the law and acknowledge mistakes had been made.
“I admit it, I’ve apologized for it and we’ve corrected it,” he said. “But the Socialist Party and the progressive coalition’s commitment to the well-being, rights and liberties of women is unequivocal, absolute and resounding.”
Controversy of a different kind surrounded the passage of one of the world’s most forward-leaning bills on transgender rights last February, which allows anybody over the age of 16 to change their gender identity in the civil registry without undergoing a two-year hormonal treatment or obtaining a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
Though the law was hailed as a landmark for the rights of transgender people, it ripped huge rifts in the government, sparking public infighting between the Podemos politicians who backed it and former Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo, of the Socialist Party, who argued the legislation was an affront to the feminist movement.
Antonelli, a former regional parliamentarian who left the Socialist Party in protest of the leadership’s handling of the law, accused Calvo of using “the flag of feminism to get into an absurd fight with the Ministry of Equality to see who was the most feminist.”
Costly controversies
THE CONTROVERSIES PROVED COSTLY to Sánchez, as the country’s right-wing parties seized on them to turn last month’s municipal elections into a referendum on the coalition government. The result was a disastrous showing for Podemos and major losses for the Socialist Party, which lost power in most of Spain’s major cities, sparking Sánchez to call an early election.
With Spaniards heading to the polls on July 23 and the country’s economy in great shape, the right is looking to make the same play once again, highlighting the government’s missteps and resulting social tensions.
And the strategy appears to be paying off: Pollsters project the center-right Popular Party to score the most votes, with the far-right Vox party — which has vowed to eradicate “the ‘woke’ ideology” in Spain — reaping enough support to make it an attractive coalition partner for the conservatives.
Madrid’s regional President Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who head’s the Popular Party’s populist faction, recently scored an absolute majority reelection campaigning against “feminist parasites“; this month, she announced plans to revise regional-level transgender rights legislation.
Though the two parties have never governed together nationally, recent agreements forged between the Popular Party and Vox at the local and regional levels offer an indication of what policies they might pursue in government.
In Valencia’s regional government, the two parties agreed to suppress all mention of gender-based violence or LGBTQ+ rights. And in provincial capitals like Burgos, Toledo, Orihuela and Valladolid, they’ve scrapped city council members in charge of equality. Meanwhile, in municipalities like Náquera and Torrijos, the new Popular Party-Vox town councils have banned rainbow flags.
The Popular Party’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has sought to cast himself as a moderate and insisted that Vox will not place conditions on the way he governs — but he’s gradually adopted many of their talking points.
Earlier this month, he announced that, if elected, he’ll eliminate the Ministry of Equality, saying “we aren’t here for that.”
He has since added that he’ll also repeal Sánchez’s transgender legislation, justifying the move by saying it shouldn’t be “easier to legally change your gender than it is to get your driver’s license.”
The Popular Party and Vox declined to comment for this article.
Culture war
COMILLAS PONTIFICAL UNIVERSITY SOCIOLOGIST Agustín Blanco, who oversees an annual survey of Spaniards’ public sentiment, said that voting intentions don’t necessarily imply a rejection of Spain’s progressive measures or indicate that the coalition had “gone too far.”
“The problem hasn’t been the policy, but rather the communication,” he said. He added that Podemos’ ministers had been “excessively messianic.”
When Zapatero passed his marriage equality law in the 2005, he expressed “profound respect” for those who opposed the legislation. But Blanco said that Sánchez’s government, in contrast, had responded to critics with “intellectual and moral arrogance” that had fanned the issue of equality into a culture war, alienating parts of Spanish society.
There are signs public sentiment is turning, at least among some Spaniards. A March Ipsos poll revealed that 53 percent of the country believes Spain has gone so far in promoting women’s equality that it is discriminating against men.
Vox has tried to capitalize on the discontent, unveiling a new billboard in Madrid last week depicting a giant hand tossing a feminist symbol and a pride flag into a trashcan.
While Spain’s progressives remain confident that legislation on gender-based violence will weather a change in government, Sangil of FELGTBI+ worried that the rise of the right will bring more hate speech and, with it, hate crimes, which she noted were already skyrocketing across the country.
She recalled that the Popular Party voted against marriage equality in 2005 and spent seven years challenging the law in the courts; she also pointed out that since coming to office in 2019, Madrid’s center-right mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, has refused to fly the rainbow flag atop city hall.
Sangil said that even if the Popular Party didn’t enter into a coalition government with Vox, it would still “try to decaffeinate existing laws or refuse to apply more recent legislation.”
But “they won’t be able to touch consolidated rights like marriage equality,” she said. “They’re going to go after the rights of transgender youth, and against lesbian and bisexual women.”
Spain’s unlikely transformation into the Scandinavia of the south could be slowed or even reversed, Blanco said, if consensus on equality continues to devolve into confrontation and polarization.
“Spain has changed incredibly quickly,” he said. “And while that’s admirable, it’s happened at a speed that perhaps hasn’t allowed us to consolidate those changes.”
“Like most Europeans, we tend to think that the past can never happen again,” Blanco said. “From historical experience, that’s something I can’t say is certain.”