Francoist Spain
Francoist Spain, also known as the Francoist dictatorship, or Nationalist Spain, and Falangist Spain, was the period of Spanish history between 1936 and 1975, when Francisco Franco ruled Spain after the Spanish Civil War with the title Caudillo. After his death in 1975, Spain transitioned into a democracy. During Franco's rule, Spain was officially known as the Spanish State. The informal term "Fascist Spain" is also used, especially before and during World War II.
During its existence, the nature of the regime evolved and changed. Months after the start of the Civil War in July 1936, Franco emerged as the dominant rebel military leader and he was proclaimed head of state on 1 October 1936, ruling over the territory which was controlled by the Nationalist faction. In 1937, Franco became an uncontested dictator and issued the Unification Decree which merged all of the parties which supported the rebel side, turning Nationalist Spain into a one-party state under the FET y de las JONS. The Spanish Nationalists received crucial support from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Estado Novo Portugal, allowing them to win the civil war over the Spanish Republicans. The end of the Civil War in 1939 brought the extension of the Franco rule to the whole country and the exile of Republican institutions. The Francoist dictatorship originally took a form described as, "fascist or quasi-fascist", "fascistized", "para-fascist", "semi-fascist", or a strictly fascist regime, showing clear influence of fascism in fields such as labor relations, the autarkic economic policy, aesthetics, the single-party system, and totalitarian control of public and private life. As time went on, the regime opened up and became closer to developmental dictatorships and abandoned the radical fascist ideology of Falangism, although it always preserved residual fascist trappings and a "major radical fascist ingredient."
During World War II, Spain did not join the Axis powers. Nevertheless, Spain supported them in various ways throughout most of the war while it maintained its neutrality as an official policy of non-belligerence. Because of this, Spain was isolated by many other countries for nearly a decade after World War II, while its autarkic economy, still trying to recover from the Civil War, suffered from chronic depression. The 1947 Law of Succession made Spain a de jure kingdom again but it defined Franco as the head of state for life with the power to choose the person who would become King of Spain and his successor.
Reforms were implemented in the 1950s, and as a result, Spain abandoned its policy of autarky. It also reassigned authority from the Falangist movement — which had been prone to isolationism — to a new breed of economists: the technocrats of Opus Dei. This led to massive economic growth, second only to Japan, that lasted until the mid-1970s, known as the "Spanish miracle". During the 1950s, the regime also changed from a totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian and repressive system, called "the First Francoism", to a slightly milder authoritarian system with limited pluralism and economic freedom. As a result of these reforms, Spain was allowed to join the United Nations in 1955. Franco was one of Europe's foremost anti-communist figures during the Cold War, and his regime was assisted by the Western powers, particularly the United States. Franco died in 1975 at the age of 82. He restored the Spanish monarchy before his death and made his successor King Juan Carlos I, who led the Spanish transition to democracy.
Establishment
On 1 October 1936, Franco was formally recognised as Caudillo of Spain—the Spanish equivalent of the Italian Duce and the German Führer—by the Junta de Defensa Nacional, which governed the territories occupied by the Nationalists. In April 1937, Franco assumed control of the Falange Española de las JONS, then led by Manuel Hedilla, who had succeeded José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who was executed in November 1936 by the Republican government. He merged it with the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista to form the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS. The sole legal party of Francoist Spain, it was the main component of the Movimiento Nacional. The Falangists were concentrated at the local government and grassroots level, entrusted with harnessing the Civil War's momentum of mass mobilisation through their auxiliaries and trade unions by collecting denunciations of enemy residents and recruiting workers into the trade unions. While there were prominent Falangists at a senior government level, especially before the late 1940s, there were higher concentrations of monarchists, military officials and other traditional conservative factions at those levels. However, the Falange remained the sole party.The Francoists took control of Spain through a comprehensive and methodical war of attrition which involved the imprisonment and executions of Spaniards found guilty of supporting the values promoted by the Republic: regional autonomy, liberal or social democracy, free elections, socialist leanings, and women's rights, including the vote. The right-wing considered these "enemy elements" to comprise an "anti-Spain" that was the product of Bolsheviks and a "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy". The latter allegation pre-dated Falangism, having evolved after the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula from the Islamic Moors. Falangist founder Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera had a more tolerant position than the National Socialists in Germany. This was influenced by the small size of the Jewish community in Spain at the time that did not favor the development of strong antisemitism. Primo de Rivera saw the solution to the "Jewish problem" in Spain as simple: the conversion of Jews to Catholicism.
At the end of the Spanish Civil War, according to the regime's own figures there were more than men and women held in prisons and some had fled into exile. Large numbers of those captured were returned to Spain or interned in Nazi concentration camps as stateless enemies. Between six and seven thousand exiles from Spain died in Mauthausen. It has been estimated that more than Spaniards died in the first years of the dictatorship from 1940 to 1942 as a result of political persecution, hunger and disease related to the conflict.
File:Meeting at Hendaye.jpg|thumb|right|Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler at the Meeting at Hendaye, 1940
Spain's strong ties with the Axis powers led Franco to seriously consider joining them during the Second World War for ideological sympathies and irredentism with a particular focus on reclaiming the British territory of Gibraltar as well as taking over French Morocco and merging it with Spanish Morocco alongside annexing the Oran district of Algeria, and French Cameroon as well as large amounts of food, oil, grain and other resources. This would lead Franco to send Juan Vigón to speak with Hitler, followed by a subsequent letter explaining Spanish demands. Hitler initially ignored such an offer, convinced that the war would soon be over and Britain would eventually come asking for terms of peace. Eventually, Hitler and the German government would turn to Spanish belligerence in response to hardened British resistance during the Battle of Britain, chiefly to seize Gibraltar, and initially agreed to its demands. These negotiations culminated in the Meeting at Hendaye between Franco and Hitler on October 23, 1940. The meeting ended in failure due to Franco's exorbitant demands and Hitler's reluctance to fulfill them to maintain friendly relations with Vichy France after the Battle of Dakar. Another attempt at bringing Spain into the war for Operation Felix in December 1940 involving Franco and Wilhelm Canaris also ended in failure with Franco himself citing Britain being unbeaten on the air and seas, the worsening economic conditions, reliance on food and oil imports from the Allies and lack of commitments. For the rest of the war, Spain remained neutral but continued to assist the Axis through various means such as sending the Blue Division to fight on the Eastern Front, allowing German submarines to operate in Spanish ports, permitting Gestapo spies to operate in Spain and sending tungsten to Germany.
Spanish ties to the Axis resulted in its international ostracism in the early years following the war as Spain was not a founding member of the United Nations and did not become a member until 1955. This changed with the Cold War that soon followed the end of hostilities in 1945, in the face of which Franco's strong anti-communism naturally tilted its regime to ally with the United States. Independent political parties and trade unions were banned throughout the duration of the dictatorship. Nevertheless, once decrees for economic stabilisation were put forth by the late 1950s, the way was opened for massive foreign investment—"a watershed in post-war economic, social and ideological normalisation leading to extraordinarily rapid economic growth"—that marked Spain's "participation in the Europe-wide post-war economic normality centred on mass consumption and consensus, in contrast to the concurrent reality of the Soviet bloc".
On 26 July 1947, Spain was declared a kingdom, but no monarch was designated until in 1969 Franco established Juan Carlos of Bourbon as his official heir-apparent. Franco was to be succeeded by Luis Carrero Blanco as Prime Minister with the intention of continuing the Francoist regime, but those hopes ended with his 1973 assassination by the Basque separatist group ETA. With the death of Franco on 20 November 1975, Juan Carlos became the King of Spain. He initiated the country's subsequent transition to democracy, ending with Spain becoming a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament and autonomous devolved governments.
Government
After Franco's victory in 1939, the Falange was declared the sole legally sanctioned political party in Spain and it asserted itself as the main component of the National Movement. In a state of emergency-like status, Franco ruled with, on paper, more power than any Spanish leader before or since. He was not even required to consult his cabinet for most legislation. According to historian Stanley G. Payne, Franco had more day-to-day power than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin possessed at the respective heights of their power. Payne noted that Hitler and Stalin at least maintained rubber-stamp parliaments, while Franco dispensed with even that formality in the early years of his rule. According to Payne, the lack of even a rubber-stamp parliament made Franco's government "the most purely arbitrary in the world." The 100-member National Council of the Movement served as a makeshift legislature until the passing of the organic law of 1942 and the Ley Constitutiva de las Cortes the same year, which saw the grand opening of the Cortes Españolas on 18 July 1942.The Organic Law made the executive government ultimately responsible for passing all laws, while defining the Cortes as a purely advisory body elected by neither direct nor universal suffrage. The Cortes had no power over government spending, and the government was not responsible to it: ministers were appointed and dismissed by Franco alone as the "Chief" of state and government. The Ley del Referendum Nacional, passed in 1945 approved for all "fundamental laws" to be approved by a popular referendum, in which only the heads of families could vote. Local municipal councils were appointed similarly by heads of families and local corporations through local municipal elections while mayors were appointed by the government. It was thus one of the most centralised countries in Europe and certainly the most centralised in Western Europe following the fall of the Portuguese Estado Novo in the Carnation Revolution.
The referendum law was used twice during Franco's rule—in 1947, when a referendum revived the Spanish monarchy with Franco as de facto regent for life with sole right to appoint his successor; and in 1966, another referendum was held to approve a new "organic law", or constitution, supposedly limiting and clearly defining Franco's powers as well as formally creating the modern office of Prime Minister of Spain. By delaying the issue of republic versus monarchy for his 36-year dictatorship and by refusing to take up the throne himself in 1947, Franco sought to antagonise neither the monarchical Carlists nor the republican "old shirts". Franco ignored the claim to the throne of Infante Juan, Count of Barcelona, son of the last king, Alfonso XIII, who designated himself as his heir; Franco found him too liberal. Instead, in 1969, Franco selected the young Juan Carlos of Bourbon, son of Infante Juan, as his officially designated heir to the throne, shortly after his 30th birthday.
In 1973, due to old age and to lessen his burdens in governing Spain he resigned as Prime Minister and named Navy Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco to the said post, but Franco remained as the Chief of State, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and Jefe del Movimiento. However, Carrero Blanco was assassinated in the same year and Carlos Arias Navarro became the country's new Prime Minister.