Sociological Francoism

[1] The root causes of sociological Francoism are found in the prolonged state of repression that existed during the forty years of the Franco dictatorship (1936–1975), and the fear of a repetition of the Spanish Civil War and a clashing of the so-called two Spains.

These include self-censorship and the voluntary submission and conformity to authority[2] – which in extreme cases could even be classified as servility (most commonly identified with the "silent majority") – which provided the regime with its cheapest, most effective and most ubiquitous form of repression.

The economically prosperous years have been mythologized within sociological Francoism; however, we should remind ourselves that this success was based on exporting the unemployed first to Catalonia and the Basque Country and then later to Europe.

[4]In a similar vein, the philosopher José Luis López Aranguren has written that "Francoism, while originally a political system, transformed into a way of life for the Spanish people".

Any clues to his personal health were carefully scrutinized, as were his cryptically expressed intentions, such as the phrase no hay mal que por bien no venga (roughly equivalent to "every cloud has a silver lining"), which he used in reference to the assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco in 1973 by the Basque separatist group ETA,[9] and whose meaning was the subject of endless speculation.

[13] From 1976 onwards, King Juan Carlos I (designated by Franco as his successor in 1969) and his team of close advisors (essentially Torcuato Fernández-Miranda and Adolfo Suárez) implemented the agreed-upon reform, which left both the inmovilistas (ultraconservatives) and the best-known aperturistas (progressives such as Manuel Fraga and José María de Areilza) sidelined from the process.

The degree of democracy thus achieved is questioned by some writers, including Armando López Salinas, who considers it essentially controlled reform, in some sense similar to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's characterization of the Italian unification in his novel The Leopard: "The ruling classes need to change something so that everything remains the same".

It was initially used as a way of denouncing behaviours, arising soon after the death of Franco, that contradicted the norms of the ultra-Catholic morality (see: the destape (literally "uncovering") period of Spanish cinema that followed the abolition of censorship, or the Movida Madrileña).

Currently it is usually used in a rhetorical way to point out the irony that, despite living in a liberal democracy, some freedoms that were permitted by the Francoist regime, such as smoking in public places or barbecuing in the mountains or the beach, have been taken away.

Similarly, it is used to criticize current problems in society that did not exist in the Franco era, like the Spanish property bubble, and the consequent delay in young adults leaving the family home.

[22][23] A final aspect is the fact that the Spanish government has traditionally been a two-party system with smaller, peripheral nationalist/regionalist parties, although the recent rise of Podemos and Ciudadanos has produced a more fragmented parliament.