Over 21% of Spaniards think the Franco years were ‘good or very good,’ survey shows

Among voters of the mainstream conservative Popular Party (PP), more people believe the dictatorship was ‘good’ than ‘bad.’ And 61% of far-right Vox voters believe the democratic system is worse or much worse than Francoism ever was

Pro-Franco rally in July 2018 in Cuelgamuros Valley outside Madrid.
SANTI BURGOS

NATALIA JUNQUERA
Madrid - OCT 13, 2025 - 16:55 WEST

More than 21% of the Spanish population considers the years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975) to have been “good or very good,” according to the latest CIS poll, compared to 65.5% of the population who says they were “bad or very bad.”

Disapproval of the dictatorship is four percentage points higher among women, who needed a man’s supervision to do things like open a bank account under Franco. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the dictator’s death, and the Spanish government has organized hundreds of events to celebrate the country’s significant transformation since then.

By political sympathies, within the mainstream conservatives of the Popular Party (PP), a majority (35.4%) believes the years of the dictatorship were “good,” which is 4.5 percentage points more than those who believe they were “bad.” Among voters of the far-right Vox — whose leader Santiago Abascal has stated in Congress that Spain’s current leftist administration is worse than the Franco dictatorship — the percentage of those who believe those years were good rises to 42%. The perception about this historical period marked by a lack of freedoms changes radically depending on the voter’s political affiliation. Thus, the gap between Socialist voters and Vox voters who consider the Franco years to have been “very bad” is 58.2 points.

By age, almost 20% of young people between 18 and 24 years old, who did not personally live through the dictatorship, believe it was “good” or “very good.” These percentages vary according to age: 15.9% in the 25-to-34 bracket view Francoism positively; so do 18.5% of those aged 35 to 44; 20.6% among those aged 45 to 54; 24.5% in the 55-to-64 group; 22.6% in the 65-to-74 group; and up to 25.8% of those over 75 rate it positively, although the majority overall believe it was bad or very bad.

A Vox lawmaker,Manuel Mariscal, said in Congress in November that “thanks to social media, a lot of youths are discovering that the period following the Civil War (1936-1939) was not one of darkness, but of progress and reconciliation to achieve national unity.”

[EL PAÍS English]

In October 1939, the Angelic Pastor had the following to say on the matter:

Iesu Christi Ecclesia, utpote fidelissima almae divinaeque sapientiae custos, non ea pro certo nititur deprimere vel parvi facere, quae peculiares cuiusvis nationis notas proprietatesque constituant, quas quidem populi iure meritoque quasi sacram hereditatem religiose acerrimeque tueantur.  

[Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, 44-45 (AAS)]

This was quoted by Pius XII's immediate successor as

The Church of Jesus Christ is the repository of His wisdom; she is certainly too wise to discourage or belittle those peculiarities and differences which mark out one nation from another. It is quite legitimate for nations to treat those differences as a sacred inheritance and guard them at all costs. 

[John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, 181]

It's now been watered down even further on the Vatican's official website as

The Church of Christ, the faithful depository of the teaching of Divine Wisdom, cannot and does not think of deprecating or disdaining the particular characteristics which each people, with jealous and intelligible pride, cherishes and retains as a precious heritage. 

There's a reason they don't want ordinary people to understand Latin.

Welsh Catholic Nationalism?

In the last few years my interest in and scepticism towards Catholic nationalism have increased almost in tandem. For the nays most recently we have the sorry example of supposedly Catholic nationalist Ireland. Fenianism, it turns out, was just another non serviam revolutionary movement like any other. Having thrown off the supposedly tyrannous yoke of British representative democracy, they are now keen to throw off the sweet yoke of Our Lord Jesus Christ and have thus far all but overthrown the fundamental principles of moral order itself. The fate of Franco's Spain since the great man's death has hardly been any better. Poland and Hungary now hang in the balance, but the long-term prognosis is not positive.

On the other hand, here and there one does still come across "interesting" Catholic nationalist figures from the not so recent past. One such, who may in fact have been a nationalist politician who happened to be a Catholic rather than the other way around, is Saunders Lewis, the founder of Plaid Cymru. And though I say he may have just happened to be a Catholic, it's also possible that, since he was a convert, there was rather more to it than that.

Lewis rejected both Anglicanism, which was of course the "religion" of the English, whom he considered foreigners, and the Methodism of his fathers. Well, he was a revolutionary, so he would, wouldn't he! And yet he did not turn to atheism. Nor indeed did he reject the "old" culture of his beloved nation and homeland. Far from being a republican, he was a staunch monarchist. And in due course he would be a vocal critic of the Novus Ordo Missae. Whereas Alex Salmond's attitude to kilts is not so different from Hitler's attitude towards beer and bratwurst, Lewis's desire, both as a medievalist and as a modernist, was, in his own words, to 'make Welsh Wales something alive, strong, powerful, belonging to the modern world.'

Indeed, Saunders Lewis shared T S Eliot's conviction that 'The important critic is the person who is absorbed in the present problems of art, and who wishes to bring the forces of the past to bear upon the solution of these problems.' [Eliot, The Sacred Wood] And in Lewis's opinion, moreover, the greatest flowering of the Welsh genius was in the late Middle Ages, specifically in the century before Henry VIII of England both "broke" with "Rome" and united England and Wales in the Act of Union of 1536.

That Plaid Cymru was founded in the 1920s at much the same time as other "interesting" parties were forming and reforming in Europe may or may not Saunders Lewis interesting depending on one's point of view. But there is little or nothing militaristic about Lewis's nationalism. His antiwar agitations in the 1930s and '40s were as much to do with pacifism as they were to do with sympathy (which others have claimed he had) for fascism*. And his nationalism was of the more wholesome sort based less on hatred of others than it was on enthusiasm for language and art. (His well documented friendship with David Jones was lifelong and as aesthetic and spiritual as it was political.)

So the decline of Plaid Cymru from being an authentic right-wing party into its current degenerate incarnation of just yet another centre left "modern" political (self-)interest groups (albeit one that chooses to spend money sending Welsh teenagers to study at English universities rather on the NHS, and despite the recent vote of the Welsh people in favour of Brexit) is yet another rather obvious example of how nationalism can and does so typically "go wrong".

But that its founder was an man of genuine and engaging vision is an edifying consideration.

*Which in any case, when one considers the sorts of endorsements that Hitler got from the likes of Churchill (in writing) and Lloyd George (in person, at Berchtesgaden itself), was hardly strange by the standards of the time!

Yuri Andreyev, 'Faith Under the Rubble' (2006)