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Historical memory is selective. This is what the historian Giles Tremlett points to when noting that “Spain has an overly idyllic view of the Franco regime.” And for good reason, Spaniards spend their time recalling the economic boom of the 1960s rather than confronting the grim record of Francoism in terms of human rights.
His observation is not only well founded but the rise of right-wing populist parties such as Vox risks Spain seeing nostalgia for Francoism become, if not hegemonic, at least a common political practice. It would be mistaken to reduce this phenomenon to a simple nostalgia for a period of economic prosperity: on closer inspection, this complacency rests on a multifaceted edifice, composed of myths that, for the most part, originate from the dictatorship’s own propaganda; myths that, in reality, are not unique to Spain. The political right in Brazil, Argentina and Chile, for instance, continues to praise their national dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s — many of which were born by drawing inspiration from Francoism and using it as a model. The right-wing populists, from Santiago Abascal to Javier Milei, including José Antonio Kast and Jair Bolsonaro, do not take pride in the repressive practices of these regimes. The analysis would be overly reductive. They rather adopt clichés that, deftly combined, lead to the conclusion that the “soft dictatorships” of the late Cold War were beneficial to the nation and, as such, deserve to be a source of pride rather than shame.
It would be false to claim that nostalgia for an authoritarian regime is necessarily a sign of longing to return to life under dictatorship. Right-wing populists display more finesse. Their instrumentalization of historical memory homes in on a few glorious and specific moments in the history of their dictatorships: the economic miracle of 1959-1973 in the case of Spain, the Chilean miracle of 1975-1983, the Brazilian miracle of 1969-1974 under Emílio Médici (also known as the “Years of Lead”), and, to a lesser extent, the miracle of 1966-1970 under Juan Carlos Onganía in Argentina.
Regardless of the cruelty they inflicted on their own citizens, these regimes would have proven unusually functional, to the point that right-wing rhetoric sometimes presents the system as more efficient than liberal democracy. It is thanks to their policies and governance of power that these regimes are said to have helped modernize the country, without overt fascist or totalitarian behaviors that were too conspicuous.
As the next electoral cycles approach in Brazil (October 2026), Spain (July 2027), Argentina (October 2027) and Chile (2029), it becomes urgent to unravel seven popular myths on which candidates and right-wing representatives will almost certainly lean in their discourse.
1 — The fault lies with the Left
Even before discussing the supposedly exceptional achievements attributed to the dictatorship, one can anticipate a well-known rhetorical sleight of hand: right-wing populists will not hesitate to insist that it was the Left that was primarily responsible for the rise of the extremes and the advent of dictatorships. Therefore, if it suffered, it can only blame itself. Leaders who rule authoritatively have long used this trick: the country stood on the brink of civil war because of the Left. If that treacherous party had stayed in power, who knows whether the nations in question might not have transformed into failed Soviet states, as Cuba did? This is a leading argument among Spanish revisionists, such as Luis Pío Moa, who claimed that Franco, while not denying his authoritarian nature, was infinitely less murderous than the Second Republic would have been had it pursued a Soviet-style regime in Spain. We are dealing with what one could call a “parallel universe fallacy.” Any debate about how the Republic — or the governments of Salvador Allende in Chile and João Goulart in Brazil — would have evolved politically had they not been toppled is not only speculative but largely irrelevant to whether the authoritarian model that followed had any positive aspect.
2 — Franco, Pinochet and Médici as “dictators who were reluctant”
One undeniable historical fact, however, is that Franco, and subsequently men like Pinochet, not only seized power by force but also slaughtered, extrajudicially and with impunity, those they regarded as “internal enemies” of the nation. It is striking that, for the right-wing populist currents, this reality barely raises any embarrassment. Conversely, echoing a line borrowed from Carl Schmitt, figures like Franco, Pinochet and Médici would supposedly have been dictators against their will, compelled to employ force to “pacify” societies in the grip of chaos. The underlying idea is that this state of exception, established by coercion through these generals, was not only desirable but collectively desired by the societies themselves. Hence the belief that these strongmen were popular and genuinely loved by most citizens. Among the myths cited, the notion of the repressive dictator who was reluctant yet popular is perhaps one of the most closely tied to the dictatorship’s own propaganda. Yet, while presenting itself as the keystone of the dictatorship and its self-legitimation, this idea of a Francoist peace—much like the peace associated with Pinochet and Médici—is simply unfounded. It would be vain to try to gauge the real popularity of these military rulers: the societies they governed were subjected to a system of systematic terror orchestrated by the State. Pinochet’s electoral debacle in 1988 nevertheless serves as evidence that even after fifteen years of oppression and propaganda, Chileans—like Spaniards, Brazilians and Argentinians before them—did not “love” their dictator. At least, not in the way today’s right-wing supporters would have us believe.
3 — The Mirage of an Alternative Democracy
One of the most fascinating, even puzzling, aspects of writing about post-fascism in the Cold War era is how dictators publicly rejected the label of “fascists” while promoting state ideologies that were, in every sense, political myths echoing Mussolini’s model of the state. The term “corporatism” illustrates this concealment strategy in semantic terms: dictators like Franco, Onganía and Pinochet learned to avoid using it from the 1960s onward. Rather than admitting that their regime models were corporatist, they began portraying them as “democracies” of a slightly different kind, which promoted “participation” and the separation of powers through means other than a democratically elected parliament. At their apex, perhaps best illustrated by Pinochet in the mid-1970s, this so-called “subsidiary state” was presented as nothing more than a new form of democracy in which the dictator, after having established “social peace,” returned executive power to society and, more precisely, to trusted “intermediate societies” within it.
We now know that this was pure political theater, regardless of where this distribution of authoritarian power originated—Juan Vázquez de Mella, Pope Pius XI or José Antonio Primo de Rivera, to name just a few sources. Yet, this illusion of an alternative democracy, allegedly more efficient, occupies today a prominent place in the platforms of right-wing parties, especially in Chile, such as the UDI and Kast’s Republican Party. The conviction that this peculiar neo-corporatist model briefly replaced Western democratic norms remains widespread among right-wing circles in Spain and Argentina as well.
4 — The Illusion of a Technocratic Governance That Transcends Ideologies
The “dictablandas” of the 1960s and 1970s indeed liked to present themselves, without fear of paradox, as spaces of direct political participation, while organizing themselves as a society ruled not by mass politics but by an elite of specialists. Political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell even gave these regimes a label that succinctly captures this mode of governance: “bureaucratic authoritarianism.” In Spain, during the 1960s, these elites were called Franco’s “technocrats.” A regime where specialists, rather than politicians, govern an industrial society and handle its conflicts is nothing other than a technocracy. Had the Spanish regimes of Franco, Onganía, and others claimed to be defending a different form of power, did they not nevertheless claim that this was the one that would take their country from “backwardness” to “development” and keep it from becoming a satellite of the United States or the Soviet Union? If the notion that expertise, efficiency, and rationalism can accompany an authoritarian regime seems plausible in the Chinese case, applying it to Franco’s Spain would be historically misleading. There is no binary opposition between an “ideological” Left and a “non-ideological” Right, whose governance would be purely technical. The technocrats around the Spanish dictator were driven by an ideology: their push to deregulate the state, in line with IMF and World Bank prescriptions, reflected a neoliberal outlook. When, in September 2019, Carlos Bolsonaro stated that “the transformation Brazil needs won’t happen as quickly as we’d like through democratic means,” he was echoing precisely that historical memory. The dream among Latin American right-wing supporters of a return to a “technocratic” form of governance capable of transcending mass politics and ideologies remains vividly present.
5 — The “Miracle” Economy and the Role of Propaganda
To understand why the fantasy of authoritarian development occupies such a central place in the right’s imagination, one must closely examine these “miracles” and “booms” that lie at the heart of this mythologized narrative. Among the seven myths presented here, this one may be the hardest to disprove. In the 1960s and 1970s, the regimes in question did indeed experience a substantial rise in GDP as their economies integrated with global financial markets and attracted foreign direct investment. However, the fact that these statistics were transformed into a “miracle” was as much a product of aggressive propaganda as of actual growth. Indeed, not only did the Spanish economy’s “miracle” of the 1960s spread widely across Latin America, but it was also presented to the Spanish public as a sophisticated process of social engineering (through peripheral “development poles” and regionalization) and a cultural and psychological “changing of skin.” It was, for ideologues of Franco, a Leisure-and-Consumption era, even a propaganda instrument that signified the end of redistributive mass politics (the “twilight of ideologies”). Despite this crude propaganda, the regime’s economic achievements did hold for a few years. What the right omits today are the disastrous consequences of these reforms, including mass immigration, brain drain, the dramatic widening of social inequality and endemic corruption. Moreover, even if one sticks to GDP figures alone, the dictatorships in question never truly surpassed the subsequent democratic governments that replaced them.
Why do we still talk about the “miracles” of Franco, Pinochet and Médici? Mainly because their promotion became the regimes’ only lifeline, using a cleverly constructed narrative: it wasn’t the elimination of communism that justified this authoritarian interlude, but the economic leap, which was considered worthwhile, and which, among other things, justified the discipline imposed on the working class “for its own good.” In other words, the credibility of this “miracle” mythology is inseparable from the teleological way in which the dictators displayed GDP statistics to the public. Thus, anyone who speaks of the “Spanish miracle” without a critical viewpoint is effectively promoting a historically inaccurate story that hides the tragedy endured by thousands of men and women whose lives were upended or destroyed by these neoliberal reforms—reforms that could probably have been implemented more gently within a liberal democracy.
6 — The Myth of a “Spiritual Renewal”
One of the most insidious discourses crafted to buttress this “miracle” is the claim that under the dictatorship society experienced unitary cohesion and an unprecedented spiritual renewal. A Francoist theorist, one of the regime’s trusted technocrats, liked to say that Spain was a nation “European in its means but Spanish in its ends”—technologically European, but culturally Catholic and insulated from the secular, liberal West. In the 1950s, under Franco, and in countries like Argentina and Chile, this mode of reactionary modernity was referred to with a particular term: “Hispanidad”. Many studies have explored the psychological and cultural dimensions of life under such a dictatorship, highlighting the processes of collective infantilization and the broad naïveté that society endured. Of course, for small circles, life was pleasant, even ideal. But to elevate regimes of Franco, Pinochet, Médici and Onganía to a space of spiritual exaltation and perfect harmony is, of course, a distorted memory. Those regimes were marked by student protests, workers’ strikes, and in return, state violence and terror. It is precisely this mass mobilization that gradually gave rise to political reform and ultimately led these regimes to yield to democracy.
More broadly, when right-wing supporters talk about the 1970s as times of “cultural unity” and “moral health,” what they omit is the oppressive censorship apparatus—and the secret police—that dictated to women and young people what they could wear, read and eat. The moral injunctions system imposed by Franco, Pinochet and Médici was not unlike the controls now in place in countries governed by sharia law. Yet Vox’s spokespeople still advocate for the “Iberosphere” (a neologism meant to echo “Hispanidad”), arguing that people should live under a different ethical system from the Western, “woke” one. In this sense, their provocative invocation of the 1970s carries a message akin to the thinking of thinkers such as Aleksandr Dugin and Steve Bannon, who argue that a nation—as a sanctuary of “Western civilization”—should purge itself of progressive ideological and cultural contamination, especially concerning LGBTQ rights and reproductive rights.
7 — The Dictatorship’s Supposed Role as a Springboard for Democratic Transition
Finally, and this is perhaps the most treacherous claim of all, the persistent belief that the 1970s’ economic modernization served as a stepping-stone to the successful democratic transition of the 1980s. Or, as a Vox member recently put it, Francoism would have been “a period of progress and reconciliation aimed at achieving national unity”. In its most extreme version, this conviction even suggests that men like Franco and Pinochet consciously sought to establish democracy in their countries after their “mandates.” In a milder, yet equally pervasive, version, it maintains that it was the dictatorship’s economic boom that birthed moderate middle classes and eventually enabled a parliamentary democracy to function. This rather fictitious scenario portrays the technocratic dictatorship as a prelude or even a necessary precondition for democracy. It is the very continuity described by Pío Moa when he asserts that “Spanish democracy was born from Francoism itself, not from anti-Francoism or the Republic”.
The historical truth is, of course, far more complex. People like Franco did not want their regime to change and did everything to entrench it as a lasting state, entrusting high offices to authoritarian figures loyal to him, such as Luis Carrero Blanco. In the case of Pinochet, he sought to establish an “authoritarian democracy” first and left Chile with a constitutional framework that hindered rather than facilitated a return to an Occidental-style democracy. As for sociological determinism that equates economic growth and consumption with political moderation and anti-communist sentiment—beyond being a reiteration of the technocrats’ “twilight of ideologies”—it is neither easily refuted nor conclusively proven. It is certain that affluent middle classes are less prone to revolutionary behavior than the poorest, but throughout world history robust democracies have emerged without the need for authoritarian modernization, certainly not through a process that involved the murder and torture of thousands.
Let us therefore retain from these seven myths spread by far-right populists that they are either false, or inaccurate, or simply a word-for-word repetition of dictatorship propaganda, or historically out of place in the debate about whether “it was worth it” to have tolerated authoritarian rule.
Nevertheless, we must ask what drives a young Vox candidate, and along with him his followers, to claim the “right to be proud” of a dictatorship that ended long before he was born. It seems that, for the new populist right, “franquismo” is less a historical phenomenon from which lessons can be drawn and inspiration found than a tool in the culture battles waged against a supposed, largely imagined, progressive and woke international arena. Consequently, there is little to gain by dwelling on the subtleties of Franco and Pinochet’s “constitutions,” nor on whether they aspired to a democratic future for their countries. When Santiago Abascal states that Franco “governed better” than Prime Ministers Sánchez, Zapatero and Rajoy, he clearly does not engage in a nuanced historical debate, nor does he intend to seriously compare the economic successes of dictatorships and democracies. Yet the historical facts are there, in Europe as in Latin America: dictatorships never truly outperformed democracies on an economic level, and even when they performed well during certain periods, the long-term harms they left to their societies hardly justified the GDP gains.