With less than a month to go for the elections, Spain claims to have “performed a duty to itself” on Thursday with the exhumation of Francisco Franco’s body from the Valley of the Fallen near Madrid. Forty-four years after his death in November 1975, marking the end of the dictatorship that bore his name, his body emerged in a coffin carried out of the basilica on the shoulders of eight of his descendants.

It was a symbolic triumph for the socialist government of Pedro Sánchez, whose party has consistently argued that the site, surmounted by its 150-metre cross, had glorified the dictator while ignoring the 500,000 people killed during the Second World War. Over the decades, the dead of both sides were dug up from mass graves and cemeteries around Spain without their families’ permission and brought to lie in the monument.

Only two of the graves were excluded in this process of relocation ~ that of Franco and of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falangist party, who was executed by firing squad in November 1936. “Today, Spain is fulfilling its duty to itself,” said Sánchez. “This decision marks an end to the moral insult that the public glorification of a dictator constitutes. We are taking another step towards the reconciliation that can only exist in the democracy and the freedom we all share.”

On closer reflection, the government may have deferred to the wishes of the post-Franco generation that has come of age since 1975. Not that there were no red herrings on the trail towards exhumation. Almost inevitably, it was opposed by the dictator’s family, by the National Francisco Franco Foundation, which seeks to preserve and promote his legacy, and by the abbot of the valley, a former election candidate for the Falange party.

The Franco family’s position has never altered: he was buried in the valley at the behest of the country’s then Prime Minister and king, making the exhumation “an act for indefensible political ends”. The handful of Franco loyalists will cavil over the timing ~ three weeks before the elections. Indeed, the timing has been criticised by both the Left and the Right. Pablo Iglesias, the leader of the anti-austerity Unidas-Podemos, accused Sánchez of “bringing the mummy out in a helicopter” for political ends after the recent unrest in Catalonia, which will be a festering issue as the nation goes to polls.

Santiago Abascal, the leader of the far-right Vox party, made a more direct invocation of the dead of ancient Egypt. “He who moves the dead winds up paying for it with the curse of Tutankhamun,” he warned solemnly. The dictator has been “put in his place” by the socialist government through what appears to be an electoral gambit.