On Nov. 8, the historic center of the beautiful Spanish city of Seville, capital of the region of Andalusia, saw something extraordinary: A group of about 50 young people, mostly in their 20s, but with many minors also present, gathered to sing fascist songs, make fascist salutes and wave flags and symbols bordering on the illegal. Young people in other countries with growing extreme right movements often have only vague ideas of what they want or what they are referencing. But Spain was ruled by the military dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco from 1936 to 1975, and it is concretely the Falange, as his fascist movement was called, that these young people are singing for.
The young fascists had assembled for a Mass at Seville’s cathedral in honor of the fallen heroes of the Falange in Spain’s brutal civil war, during which Franco’s forces executed an estimated 100,000 civilians. When the church decided to close its doors against these young people, they were left to perform for TikTok, X and the few legacy media representatives who were present.
The Spain that Franco conquered with his Catholic-fascist forces was a country of donkeys and bullfights, women in black, and poor, superstitious peasants — a very different place from the modern European country of today. Part of what drives this new generation is easy to guess: social media. An investigation by Maldita.es published in Spanish and English states: “The expression ‘we lived better under Franco’ has become shorthand for a series of recurring sub-narratives, many of them disinformative, that appear across dozens of Telegram channels, viral TikTok videos, YouTube clips or on X.” Opinion polls show a sharp rise in sympathy for authoritarianism, concentrated among the young (including more than one-quarter of Gen Z men).
Schoolchildren repeat phrases like “Isn’t this government a dictatorship too?” and echo claims that the Spain of the 1940s and ’50s was a fairyland of happiness and prosperity, with work, housing, wine and football for all — rather than a country defined by grinding poverty. They tap into a nostalgia for a vanished Spain that never completely went away. The grandparents of today’s Spanish youth survived Franco, and the great-grandparents may have supported him in the years of blood. But the gory details of this period are often missing from today’s nostalgia. After Franco’s forces achieved victory with the support of Hitler’s Luftwaffe, he executed 200,000 people across Spain, effectively eliminating the political opposition for a generation. It was not ethnic cleansing but political murder in service of stamping out what he saw as a Jewish-Marxist-Masonic conspiracy to take over Europe.
Opinion polls show a sharp rise in sympathy for authoritarianism, concentrated among the young.
The internet-driven populist rebellion and nostalgia has led to the rise of a right-wing party called Vox. Like the MAGA movement in the U.S., it seeks to be a big tent, pushing familiar issues like immigration and xenophobia, and opposes the regional autonomy that is the signature of post-Franco Spain. The parties’ call for strong central authority has a big element of authoritarian nostalgia, which sometimes spills out into the open.
Last year a Vox member of parliament, Manuel Mariscal Zabala, said in the Congress of Deputies, “Thanks to social media, many young people are discovering that the post-civil war period was not as dark as this government claims, but rather a time of reconstruction, progress and reconciliation to achieve national unity.” The same social media channels presenting Franco’s dictatorship in this manner also routinely praise Hitler and Mussolini, deny or minimize the Holocaust and increasingly demonize Muslim immigrants.
In November, Francisco García Avilés, the Vox mayor of a town in Andalusia, made waves by distributing a calendar with photos of Franco and fascist slogans. He not only defended the calendar, but Franco himself in emotional terms — a direct challenge to Spain’s Law of Democratic Memory, which forbids demonstrations of support for the dictator. The Socialist Party’s regional officer for the law said, “Exalting a dictatorial regime that brought death, repression, poverty, misery and backwardness to our country is an insult that offends and humiliates the victims and their family members.”
On paper, the Vox party leadership remains committed to democratic methods and national laws. However, an investigation by El Español uncovered that in September 2023, the party had covertly founded an unofficial youth wing, Revuelta (Revolt), that is far less inhibited. One of their first actions was to stage a protest about the Valley of the Fallen, a Civil War monument created by Franco and partly built with forced labor by political prisoners after his victory, which also contained his own tomb and that of his mentor from the 1920s, the founder of the Falange, Gen. Primo de Rivera.
After decades of arguments back and forth, the remains of Franco and Primo de Rivera were exhumed and reburied elsewhere, and the Socialist government in Madrid decided to rename and repurpose the site as a nonpartisan monument to all the dead of the Civil War. Opposition to such a move might be expect from a few old men wearing medals, not by a crowd of excited teenagers.
One huge difference from the Spanish fascism of today and that of the 1920s and ’30s is that there is no mention at all of religion. While there is no evidence of the Catholic Church being involved in preparing Franco’s 1936 coup d’état, once the civil war started, church authorities from the Vatican down jumped in on Franco’s side and enthusiastically promoted the “holy war,” a “crusade” against Moscow led by “the savior of the fatherland.” In September 1936, Pope Pius XI declared that Catholics killed in the conflict were “martyrs in all the sacred and glorious meaning of the word.” While there are still a few fanatical right-wing Catholics, and while many Catholic traditions survive, only 3% of people in Spain today say religion is one of their most important values, compared with 45% of Americans, and recent attempts by the church to attract the young have failed.
“Vox avoids using religion because it wouldn’t work as an electoral strategy in a society that is increasingly secular,” Professor Maite Aurrekoetxea Casaus of the University of Deuslo in the Basque country told Truthdig. “Stressing religious values would seriously limit the parties potential for electoral expansion, especially with the young.”
The appeal of the fascist past to Spanish youth today is quite different. Revuelta has a Telegram channel that invites people to share its messages on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and X. A typical message from October reads: Either you are a patriot, or you are a parasite.
Even more alarming is the very active Telegram channel of the Falange itself. This includes videos of young people being trained in hand-to-hand combat, with links leading to a youth wing, Falangist Youth of Spain, glorifying not just Franco and the fascist past, but other old-school European fascist movements like the Iron Guard of Romania, responsible for an independent murder campaign against Romania’s Jews but now presented as heroic defenders of Europe. The channel, basically a Hitler Youth revival act, also offers links to contemporary fascist youth movements in Italy and across Europe.
There is now a whole social media ecosystem glorifying Spain’s fascist past.
The Falange was an officer-class movement of the rich and the bourgeoisie, and the youth organization is aimed at university students from the same social class, organizing events in law faculties and university campuses. Bypassing legacy media entirely, in a post from Nov. 13 young people dressed in black are seen putting up posters for fascist rallies at night, with stirring patriotic music and an atmosphere of edgy rebellion.
There is now a whole social media ecosystem glorifying Spain’s fascist past. One channel, Franquismo, celebrates a battalion that Franco provided to Hitler for the Eastern Front, something that even most Franco supporters keep quiet about. Another channel, Franquista, accuses the Catholic Church of treason for having abandoned its support for Franco and the Falange.
The online campaign appears to be working. Spanish schoolchildren told the Spanish TV station RTVE that they are rebelling not only against the government and the established political parties, but against the state-sponsored education program that tells them Franco was evil. One 18-year-old student, Carmen Neila, said, “It’s getting fashionable to say that the dictatorship wasn’t so bad. It’s the new indie fashion.”
Casaus, the university professor, has analyzed the “influencer” style of what she calls “the digital ultra-right.” The audience for the social media channels, she says, “don’t seek a literal return to the past, but something more worrying: the exaltation of disorder as a form of identity and power. The aim is not to restore Francoism, but to revive its esthetic, empty it of history and fill it with adrenaline.” The leaders are “entrepreneurs of chaos. … Whoever dominates the narrative also dominates reality. Their language is that of clickbait: short, aggressive, effective.” School teachers confirm the effect: students repeating dictatorship slogans from TikTok without any real idea of where they came from. A study in the Spanish Education Review found that 80% of students graduating from high school don’t know anything about the repression of the Franco era.
The youth fashion for fascism-lite is rising across Europe — notably in Germany, France, Italy and Poland — but in Spain there is one important difference. While dictatorship may be seen as cool, there is no dictator on the horizon: no Trump, Farage or Le Pen. It appears to be a TikTok or YouTube influencer kind of phenomenon, separated from actual politics: an expression of opposition to the system without a candidate to take it over. So far, it is a grin without a cat. The question of how long it will remain so is the looming question of Spanish politics. None of the Vox leaders present themselves as a future dictator. The only possible candidates might arise from one of the youth groups, leveraging social media and weaponizing the ignorance of the young.
