Quick Take: Franco, Best Dictator Ever

Francisco Franco died 50 years ago and some in his native country still hope for a resurrection or something

(This is the first of several articles about Francisco Franco’s regime, ahead of the 50th anniversary of his death later this year.)

I was born in a Fascist dictatorship. I always tell myself I should bring this up more but somehow I never find the right occasion. Maybe the next time somebody complains that not allowing the homeless occupy the best half of the floor space at the swanky Starbucks in Georgetown, DC, is Fascism?

“Hey, man, I should know,” I will say confidently. “I was born in a Fascist dictatorship myself.”

I was two-and-a-half when Francisco Franco, founder and sole ruler of Spain’s Fascist state, died Nov. 20, 1975. There’s a family anecdote (I was the eldest male grandson for all my grandparents, so a baby celebrity in my family) that I stared at the TV as it displayed Franco’s shriveled old body inside a coffin and asked:

“Mummy, why is that man inside a small crib?”

Growing up in Spain until I moved to Australia, few had doubts that what the country had left behind was a Fascist dictatorship. The Francoist state had all the hallmarks of Fascism — single-party rule, nationalism, anti-feminism and government control of the economy in partnership with the private sector — and all of dictatorship, given its status as temporary, emergency fix and the fact that Franco himself appointed a king, rather than another Generalissimo, as successor¹.

I also had the occasion of hearing jokes, stories and comments about Franco non-stop for a long time. One of the best remarks was typically uttered by older people who despaired about the post-Franco direction of the country:

“If only Franco were to raise his head up again.”

The Leftist response typically was: “He would bang his head against the crypt’s lid.”

Those were the times. Franco wasn’t all that popular, and parties openly supporting his legacy rarely could summon enough support to even make it into parliament, not that tall of a task under the Spanish system.

This is why, when I returned to Spain as a “foreign” correspondent for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, early in this wondrous 21st century, I was pretty surprised to see continued references to Franco in our copy and that of our English-language rivals from Reuters, the New York Times, etc.

It took me a while to understand that Franco, evil winner of the Spanish Civil War, essentially remains the most (in)famous Spaniard for most learned people in the Anglosphere, always together with the prominent Spanish sportsman of the day (in recent years, tennis supremo Rafael Nadal). After all, Franco was for decades the one true Fascist dictator alive and ruling in the world².

When I did understand this convenient truth, I embraced it to write stories about, for example, how Franco is to be blamed for the fact that famous streets and squares remain named after deplorable Franco-supporting people of no obvious achievement, like Salvador Dali, and for Spain’s late dining hours. I loved the lede for this one:

MADRID—Ignacio Buqueras is winning converts in his decade-old crusade to remove one of the last vestiges of Francisco Franco's dictatorship—the time of the day.

In that spirit, I think it’s important to understand why, fifty years after his death, Franco is seemingly becoming more and more popular in his country. There are various reasons, but perhaps the most important requires to quote James Carville, a man who used to advise Bill Clinton: “it’s the economy, stupid.”

The most concise, illuminating and to-the-point study on this subject that I know of was written by an economist called Daniel Fernandez and published in 2018. To understand Fernandez’s conclusions one must grasp the basics of Spanish economic history, which are not that complicated: even as it was the world’s paramount power for much of the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain was never rich.

A rather rugged, frequently dry country with smallish rivers that were for the most part insufficient as avenues for cheap transportation downriver — compared with Europe’s great trading rivers, including the Seine and Loire, Po, Rhine and Thames; for Christ’s sake, even Florence has the short and yet imposing Arno River — Spain didn’t get much of an imperial dividend since the country’s kings remained obsessed with maintaining their expensive northern European possessions, mostly in their role as staunch defenders of Catholicism.

This role turned Spain into the quintessential enemy of Protestant Europe, precisely the chunk of the world that was ascending to a position of global dominance. When Russians were still widely seen as drunk, sympathetic, bumbling simpletons, Spaniards were evil religious radicals all dressed in black, spreading crazy ideas like their obsession with not burning witches.

The French invasion of Spain in 1808-1814, when the country had already fallen to the second rank of European powers, was enormously destructive and left Spain essentially in the hands of a liberal elite in love with Freemasonry and obsessed with dragging the peasantry and aristocracy into the industrial/enlightened age one way or another. Various civil wars against reactionary Catholics, as well as numerous blunders on the part of the liberals, meant that Spain was only modestly industrialized by the time the Second Republic was proclaimed after a coup broadly supported by left-leaning and right-leaning elites in 1931.

Spain’s Republicans had really bad timing, given the crash of 1929, and those Republicans (from 1933 mostly radical leftists supported by the country’s smallish Communist Party) in any case were terrible managers of the economy and pretty much everything else they touched.

Relying on data from the Maddison Project compiling historical economic statistics from much of the world³, Fernandez comes up with this historical summary for average growth of per capita income⁴ within six historical periods: the Sexenio Democratico refers to a liberal-dominated, rather chaotic era in the mid-19th century that came before the moderate Restauracion Borbonica, followed by the short dictatorship of general Miguel Primo de Rivera, father of the most famous Primo de Rivera:

As you can see, right off the bat, the Second Republic was just awful, being mostly a recessionary era even before the outbreak of Civil War in 1936, while “Franquismo” was by far the most prosperous economic period in recent Spanish history.

Breaking this data down and only considering “stable” eras of low political unrest, Fernandez then divides the Restauracion, Franquismo and post-1975 into two halves each, when it comes to per capita growth:

This clarifies that the most prosperous era within Franquismo was the second half, from 1959, and that Spain’s economy (like Italy) has recently been in a serious slump even worse than your average euro stagnation.

None of those things are surprising: the economic woes of the European Union are well documented, and all historians of 20th century Spain have the year of 1959 marked as a milestone for pro-market reforms. And yet it’s worth stressing that impressive 3.4% average growth in per capita income during the EARLY Franquismo period: that was the time when Spain was rebuilding from a very long and destructive civil war, while most of the rest of the planet was involved in World War II and international trade was at a nadir. Moreover, Spain after the war was subjected to a UN embargo, pushed by the Communist bloc and supported by the West, between 1945 and 1955, and never received a dime in US money for reconstruction (the Marshall Plan) unlike France, Italy, Germany and the rest.

Still, at this time Spain under Franco was an economic outperformer and indeed this was the second most prosperous era in Spanish modern economic history, only trailing the other half of Franquismo. That’s pretty impressive, and an important reflection to have in mind when historians of the period discount the pre-1959 years as an era of crazy Fascist autarky. Franco, unlike Hitler and Mussolini, was not an idiot.

Fine, you are thinking. Nobody thinks of Spain as an economic superpower, before or since, so Franco relatively speaking did well: compared with the other Catholic weirdos that governed that unhappy nation. What about the international economic context, uh?

Here’s Fernandez somewhat complex calculations. He took an average of large Western European nations and compared Spain’s per capita income with them, at the start of each of the periods we described before. So, from right to left, you have the relative growth of income between the start and the end of the period, the level reached at the end of the period, and the level at which Spain started the period:

This is easier to read than it seems. Take Franquismo (1939-1975): the per capita income of Spain, destroyed by the Civil War, was 38.6% of the Western European average and it soared to 69.3% during the period, an increase of almost 31 percentage points; if 1945 is taken as the starting point, the increase is also pretty significant, but just 13 percentage points. Franco created the Spanish middle class⁵.

To present this data on a more visual manner, I played around with Maddison’s numbers myself, and created several charts. This is the first, displaying Spain’s per capita income in blue, with UK and France and top, between 1850 and 1930. One can see that during this period Spain essentially mirrored the economic performance of Finland:

Next, the same countries during the period spanning the Spanish Second Republic and the Civil War: no bueno. Spain clearly was a laggard, even under a difficult international context, well before the conflict started.

Importantly, all this economic expansion under Franquismo that I just charted was conducted during a period of massive deleveraging. How massive? Very freaking massive. The chart below shows Spain’s government debt as a percentage of GDP since the late 19th century. During Franquismo, debt fell of the way to a bottom of 7.3% in 1975, and it’s now well above 100%, back in 19th century levels, as of 2024.

We’re on a roll here, so there’s a couple of extra charts. First: births (“nacimientos,” in blue) and deaths in Spain:

Do I hear you say “average for the era”? Nope:

Suicides:

1. Franco never had any illusion that this preferred political arrangements would survive long after his death. Shortly before his death, Franco met Vernon Walters, a US envoy sent by then-President Richard Nixon to get Franco’s take on Spain’s future alignments. According to Walters, Franco said: “I have created institutions and nobody thinks they will work. They are wrong. The Prince will be King, because there is no alternative. Spain will go far along the path that you, the English and the French want: democracy, pornography, drugs and whatnot.”

2. Calling Portugal’s contemporary strongman Antonio Oliveira de Salazar a “Fascist dictator” stretches the meaning of both words a bit beyond the bounds I would recommend. Using the same expression for any contemporary Latin American strongman is downright absurd.

3. Fernandez consistently misspells the name of the project, as “Madisson,” but his handling of the data is solid.

4. Mainstream media typically puts emphasis on GDP growth, which doesn’t take variations of the population into account. That explains why economic basket cases with high population growth, like Pakistan, often report apparently strong GDP numbers. Their per capita, per person, economic performance still remains putrid.

5. This is a good moment to explain how the aforementioned conversation between Walters and Franco continued:

F: “…There will be great follies, but none will be fatal for Spain.”

W: “But, general, how can you be sure.”

F: “Because I am going to leave something that I did not find 40 years ago.”

I thought he was going to say the Armed Forces, but he said:

F: “The Spanish middle class."