Iker Arregui Alegria

Public spaces are increasingly becoming battlegrounds over collective identity, as
societies revisit which figures deserve commemoration. The removal of statues and
street names has become a powerful symbolic act, as for those attached to these
legacies, such changes may be seen as denying their group identity. This paper
examines the political consequences of such symbolic changes in the context of Spain,
focusing on the recent renaming of streets honoring figures from the dictatorship.
Using three complementary empirical strategies and drawing on both observational
and survey evidence, I find that removing Francoist streets leads to a significant
increase in support for far right parties in the affected areas, particularly when the
names held high salience. I further implement a novel individual level survey and
show that this response is driven by identity-based concerns rather than practical
objections, shedding light on the political consequences of contested memory in
democratic societies.