Madrid: The Spanish government is considering moving its clocks back an hour to Greenwich Mean Time, abandoning the time zone it joined under the Franco dictatorship in a show of allegiance to Hitler’s Germany.

Fatima Banez, the labour minister, told parliament on Monday that the government was studying the impact of moving Spain back an hour from Central European Time (CET) to GMT, a move to help workers make an earlier start in the morning.

Spain is the farthest West of all countries on CET after General Franco switched the country to the same time as Germany in 1940.

In Santiago de Compostela, the capital of the western-most region on the Spanish mainland, Galicia, this week’s official sunrise time is 8.56am, meaning that children are starting their school day in complete darkness.

Out in the Atlantic, the Canary Islands, like Spain’s neighbour Portugal, already use GMT.

Jose Luis Casero, president of the National Commission for the Rationalisation of Spanish Schedules, welcomed the government’s move to strike at “the heart of Spain’s late-hours culture in which prime time on the television runs from 10pm to midnight”.

Casero said that the change should take place in March 2017 or 2018 when Spain would simultaneously comply with the European directive in putting clocks forward an hour and repeal Franco’s decree, with the net result that Spain would be on BST instead of Central European Summer Time.

“There would be no disruption or confusion for citizens under this route map.”

Banez of the conservative Popular Party said she also wishes to strike a deal with employers and unions so that “the typical working day in Spain ends at 6pm”.

She said that telecommuting and flexitime could help employees achieve a better work-family balance.

The centrist Ciudadanos supports the changes, having been the first to include a reform to Spain’s time zone and working hours in its manifesto before the 2015 election.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy then took on board these ideas before last June’s repeat poll.

The opposition Socialists said that Banez’s proposal was “playing to the crowd” and stressed the greater importance of providing quality employment in a country where unemployment stands at 19 per cent.

The average day for a Spanish office worker is divided into two sessions, typically from 9am to 2pm and 4pm to around 8pm, with a long lunch break. Nuria Chinchilla, an IESE business school professor, said Spanish parents are “heroes” given the difficulty of combining evening work and childcare. “Women enter a job market which is male, made by and for men. But these men now also want to be fathers and have a life outside work,” she said.