Unlike other infamous 20th-century leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini, whose regimes collapsed in the flames of war, Francisco Franco’s dictatorship endured for several decades. Spain remained under his rule from the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 until 1975, when he died peacefully in his bed – a striking reminder of how deeply entrenched his system of control and fear had become. 

His regime was among the most violent of modern times: between 115,000 and 130,000 were disappeared, 150,000 were assassinated, some 30,000 children were stolen from their parents, and thousands of political opponents were incarcerated, according to the Platform for the Truth Commission, which draws on the investigations of ex-judge Baltasar Garzón. There are thought to be 2,800 Franco-era mass graves around Spain. As the anniversary of Franco’s death approaches, Spain’s political parties remain deeply divided over how to mark the occasion, indicating that many of the debates surrounding his legacy are far from settled. 

At the start of 2025, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declared that the year would be dedicated to remembering the impact of the dictatorship and celebrating Spain’s progress since the transition to democracy. In an opening ceremony at Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum, he announced a nationwide programme of around 100 commemorative events. Notably, King Felipe VI was absent from the event due to another commitment, while the conservative Popular Party (PP) and far-right Vox denounced the initiative as a political stunt by Sánchez. Vox even called it a form of “necrophilia” which “divides Spaniards” by restricting “freedom of thought”.  

Francoism’s regenerator 

The PP, which currently holds 137 seats in parliament (17 more than the Socialists, who are ruling Spain through a minority government), was established in 1989 as a refoundation of the People’s Alliance, made up of former officials of the Franco regime who opted to join the democratic process. In those early days of democracy, Spain’s far right remained largely irrelevant, meaning that the country bucked the European trend of rising right-wing populism. This continued even in the several years following the 2008 financial crisis. However, by 2013, Vox had emerged, founded by hardline defectors from the PP and individuals with personal or ideological ties to Francoist structures. In just over a decade, Vox has secured 33 seats in Spain’s parliament, known as the Congress of Deputies, and recent polls suggest its support is on the rise. 

“The issue is that the right wing in Spain has not evolved [from Francoism],” says Candela López, congresswoman for Comuns, a left-wing Catalan party that grew out of a coalition of Podemos, eco-socialists and activist movements, who is a former member of Catalonia’s Green Initiative. “While the European centre-right has clearly broken with its authoritarian past, in Spain the main conservative party has still not clearly and categorically condemned Francoism…Over the years, it has had many opportunities to do so, and it has wasted them all.” 

She points to many examples of PP and Vox’s refusal to distance itself from the regime: in 2002, PP voted against a parliamentary declaration condemning the 1939 military coup and the subsequent dictatorship; it also opposed a 2007 Historical Memory Law seeking to both recognise the victims of the civil war and Francoism and remove the regime’s remaining symbols from public spaces. More recently, PP-Vox regional coalitions have sought to advance so-called “laws of concord”, whereby terms like “dictatorship”, “Francoism”, and “civil war” are omitted from school curricula, history textbooks, and official commemorative texts. The laws also seek to replace explicit recognition of Franco-era crimes with references instead to general political violence, to restrict exhumation permits needed for investigations into the whereabouts of the disappeared, as well as funding for historical memory projects and associations.  

This, Candela believes, is due to the transition in the 1970s having been “an agreed transfer of power” rather than a democratic rupture. “There was no real purge of the regime’s apparatus, nor of the state security forces, nor of the judiciary, nor of the army,” she says. 

There was no real purge of the regime’s apparatus, nor of the state security forces, nor of the judiciary, nor of the army.

Dr José Antonio Pozo González, an expert on social movements, syndicalism, and repression during the dictatorship, agrees with Candela. He argues that although many of the dictatorship’s instruments were rebranded and in some cases seemingly dissolved, little really changed. “For example, the Court of Public Order, created to persecute political opposition, was dissolved in 1977 and replaced by the current National Court.” Around 60 per cent of its judges, who had prosecuted thousands of opponents of the dictatorship, continued serving in the new institution. 

A similar pattern was repeated in the police. The General Police Corps became the Superior Police Corps in 1978, and then the current National Police Corps in 1986. According to Pozo González, notorious torturers were not punished or demoted. “In some cases,” he says, “they were even promoted and placed in positions of responsibility.” 

In the book Franquismo S. A., journalist Antonio Maestre also talks about the way the country’s economic elites have benefited from the dictatorship. Companies like Iberdrola (an electric utility firm), Acciona (an infrastructure and renewable energy conglomerate), Fenosa (now Naturgy, a natural gas and electricity company) and ACS (infrastructure and engineering) thrived thanks to Franco’s privatisations and forced labour – the regime transferred state assets to loyal businessmen and employed political prisoners on major construction projects. Similarly, journalist Mariano Sánchez Soler, in Los ricos de Franco (“Franco’s wealthy”), mentions that at least 43 ministers from the dictatorship became prominent executives in the banking sector. 

This heritage, however, is not uniquely Spanish. As historian David de Jong documents in Nazi Billionaires, many of today’s German business dynasties built their fortunes under the Third Reich and retained their power after 1945. In Italy, the post-fascist right was never fully purged from politics, a continuity reflected in the presence of post-fascist forces in government today. 

Yet Candela stresses that there is a crucial difference: while these continuities existed elsewhere, Germany, Italy, and Portugal nonetheless attempted to break with their dictatorships at an institutional and symbolic level. In Spain, the “Pact of Forgetting”, enshrined in the 1977 Amnesty Law, deliberately avoided holding Franco’s regime accountable for its crimes. 

However, Manuel Cabanas Veiga, researcher and professor at Lleida University, argues that if the far right is indeed rising, it is not entirely because of Spain’s mishandling of its past, but rather because of an international landscape in which far-right ideologies are reawakening. “Vox is not the heir to Francoism,” he says, “but its regenerator.” 

A global shift 

A recent study from the Institute for Youth in Spain shows that 8 per cent of young men today identify with the far right. A compilation of data from this and other investigations conducted in 2024 indicates that between 25 per cent and 30 per cent of young men hold conservative and reactionary views on key issues such as feminism, immigration, and the democratic system. Meanwhile, surveys warn that projected support for the far-right Vox party in the next elections has risen to 18.9 per cent.  

If this rise persists, the right wing in Spain could be strong enough to beat the Socialist Party and form a coalition, thereby continuing a broader European trend. Indeed, 2024 was characterised by a shift to the right: European elections and national polls in France, Portugal, Belgium and Austria showed a move towards the right and the far right.  

“It is not so much a European context as an international one,” says Manuel Cabanas Veiga. “This has a clear influence from Bolsonaro, Trump, Putin, and Milei – all of them defend the primacy of the nation and classical values such as family and conventional heterosexuality, while at the same time defending neoliberal policies that reject measures of social interventionism.” Research points to both rising economic inequalities and cultural anxieties as factors behind the rise of the far right. Cabanas Veiga argues that “it is fear of the present situation and hope for an idyllic future that drives individuals to irrational actions that they justify for the common good.”  

It is fear of the present situation and hope for an idyllic future that drives individuals to irrational actions that they justify for the common good.

Numbers of far-right movements have received backing from wealthy private donors, ultra-conservative think tanks, and even foreign governments, many of whom seek to dismantle the European welfare paradigm built after the Second World War. In Spain, Vox is under investigation for accepting a 9.2 million-euro loan from a Hungarian bank tied to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s inner circle; Germany’s AfD has benefitted from anonymous donors, property magnates, billionaires, and aristocrats; and American conservative think tanks like the Heartland Institute have built ties with far-right lawmakers in the European Parliament to shape climate and social policy. 

Spillover effect 

Since its first breakthrough in 2018, when it won 12 seats in the Andalusian regional elections, Vox has become a necessary ally for the PP to be able to govern in several Spanish regions. By 2022, Vox entered formal governing coalitions with the PP, beginning in Castilla y León and later in the Valencian Community, Extremadura, Aragón, the Balearic Islands, Murcia, and the Canary Islands. While Vox quit the coalitions with the PP in 2024 due to disagreements over migration policy, it continues to influence policymaking by providing external support to regional governments. 

This rise of the far right has pushed the PP to adopt tougher rhetoric on key social issues. In Castilla y León, the party agreed to a law that removed the specific gendered framing of violence against women, redefining it as violence against “all victims” – a change widely seen as echoing Vox’s attempt to dilute the protections offered under gender violence legislation. In Valencia, after reaching an agreement with Vox on the terms of the 2025 budget, PP president Carlos Mazón announced that the region would no longer accept additional undocumented migrants in temporary reception centres funded by the national government. 

As political analyst Pablo Simón told El País, this dynamic reflects a broader efecto arrastre (“spillover effect”): “Regional pacts of the PP with Vox have forced it to buy part of their agenda.” Yet polls suggest this alignment may be eroding the PP’s own centrist identity. According to a September poll by 40dB barometer, if elections were held today, the PP would remain the leading party but drop to 30.7 per cent – below its July 2023 result. Vox, meanwhile, was at 17.4 per cent – its best polling result to date. 

On the left, the Socialist Party (PSOE) remains competitive despite corruption scandals that had dented its popularity in earlier polls. Parties to its left, Sumar and Podemos, however remain too small to outweigh a potential PP-Vox coalition. 

Spain has been led by the Left since 2018, when Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE came to power after a successful no-confidence vote against Mariano Rajoy, and later sustained his mandate through coalitions with Unidas Podemos and, more recently, Sumar. In the July 2023 elections, Sánchez managed to win another term despite the PP’s narrow lead, relying on complex agreements with regional and pro-independence parties.  

Unlike many European governments that have tightened migration rules and boosted military budgets, Sánchez’s cabinet expanded legal migration pathways – most notably by moving to legalise about 300,000 undocumented immigrants per year to address labour shortages and demographic decline. At the same time, it resisted pressure to sharply increase defence spending – rejecting a NATO-backed push under Donald Trump for member states to commit to 5 per cent of GDP on defence as “unreasonable and counterproductive”. 

These policies have positioned Spain as one of the few socialist exceptions in Europe, alongside Denmark under Mette Frederiksen and Malta under Robert Abela. However, this balance could shift in the next elections if the PP consolidates its alliances with Vox and other right-wing forces. 

Believing in monsters 

The return to a more radical right in Spain – and to slogans that have not been heard since Franco’s time – is also driven by a failure in the way the civil war and Franco’s dictatorship are taught, historian José Antonio Pozo González argues. “The study of the civil war and Franco’s dictatorship has been included in school textbooks for years, but it is only touched upon very briefly,” he complains. “As a result, generations of young people are completely unaware of what the dictatorship represented and the disastrous consequences its ideas had for the country.” 

In fact, in the vast majority of Spanish regions, the civil war and the dictatorship are only included in the part of the curriculum aimed at students in the final two years of school, which are not compulsory. With rising numbers of students leaving school early to enrol in vocational and technical training, the study of the dictatorship risks being lost unless it is introduced earlier.  

That is why Candela López says her party is advocating for greater awareness in the education system and public media of Franco’s repression, as well as encouraging the teaching of democratic memory. “It is of fundamental importance: what is not explained is repeated, and what is not condemned becomes normalised,” she claims. “It is our responsibility to future generations and to the democracy of our country to explain the past in order to protect a present and a future of rights, freedoms and social justice.” 

What is not explained is repeated, and what is not condemned becomes normalised.

The historical memory policies being promoted by the government under the most recent Historical Memory Law of 2022 not only include a reform of the educational curriculum, but also the annulling of all political convictions handed down during Franco’s rule, the locating of approximately 114,000 people who disappeared, and the removal of public symbols, statues, plaques, street names, or buildings that glorify Francoism. The most emblematic case is the Valley of the Fallen, Franco’s vast mausoleum near Madrid, where his remains were exhumed in 2019 and which the government has since pledged to transform into a place of democratic memory. 

While Manuel Cabanas Veiga, an expert on political polarisation, agrees on the importance of remembrance, reparation, and confronting Spain’s authoritarian past, he warns that not all symbolic gestures are equally effective. Measures like transferring Franco’s remains or banning Francoist associations, he argues, may inadvertently validate the far right’s narrative of persecution, giving it the relevance and visibility it craves. The answer, he suggests, may lie not only in remembering, but in refusing to grant these movements the attention they need in order to grow. 

“The far right needs a scenario of victimisation, where it is persecuted for defending values that are in danger,” Cabanas Veiga argues. “Populism grows with Manichean messages laden with hatred that go viral because of the noise they make. The solution is to turn a deaf ear to this noise: monsters only exist when you believe in them.”