José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero an MP he was finally exempted. Zapatero attended his first political rally, organized by the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in Gijón in 1976. Some political parties had been legal since 21 July 1976, but the PSOE was not legalized until February 1977. The speech of Felipe González, the PSOE leader and future Prime Minister of Spain, who took part in the rally, exerted an important influence on Zapatero. He said, among other things, that "the Socialists' goal was the seizure of power by the working class to transform the ownership of the means of production" and that "the PSOE
Pact of forgetting 1936. There have also been some notable references to the Civil War in the arts in recent years (for example, Javier Cercas' novel "Soldiers of Salamis"). In 2006, two-thirds of Spaniards favored a "fresh investigation into the war." The pact was given a legal basis in the Spanish 1977 Amnesty Law. The pact was challenged by the socialist government elected in 2004, which under prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero passed the Historical Memory Law. Among other measures, the Historical Memory Law rejected the legitimacy of laws passed and trials conducted by the Francoist regime. The Law repealed some Francoist