ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
dictator’s consultation system, ‘permitted it a first hearing of the impact of public policies and
to make suggestions about the implications of the measures to be adopted’. Finally, it also
underlined its subordinate character compared to the National Assembly, given that its
advisory opinions were not necessarily taken into account during debates in the National
Assembly However, it is worth noting that the National Assembly was also given a
subordinate role as an adviser on legislation and was closely integrated with the executive
and subservient to it in a regime, not of separation of powers but of ‘organic unity’
Compared with Salazarism, Franco’s neighbouring regime represented the institutionalization
of a dictatorship through a radical break with the institutional liberal past – much more so
than Italian Fascism. The product of a bloody civil war, the main characteristic of the first
years of the Franco regime was its radical break with democracy. During the early years of
Francoism, ‘the nominal structure of the Franco regime was the most purely arbitrary of the
world’ Officially announcing a totalitarian model following the creation of a single party
formed through the forced unification of groups that had supported him during the civil war,
FET-JONS (Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista), under Falange
leadership – even if placed under Franco’s authority – not only managed to create a party
apparatus and ancillary organizations that were much more powerful, but its access to
segments of the new political system was closer to the PNF in Mussolini’s Italy.
Social corporatism was an essential component of Francoism and its institutions, which began
to be sketched out in nationalist-controlled areas during the civil war, where tensions existed
between the Falange’s national syndicalist model and those of groups closer to conservative
Catholics. Not all of these conflicts were doctrinal in nature; some were expressions of the
fears within the Falange that its role in the creation of the new corporatist structure would be
reduced. However, these fears were not confirmed, as both the 1938 labour charter (Fuero
del Trabajo) and the definition of the institutional structure of the Francoist labour
organization gave the Falange a central role. In 1940, when the syndical union law required
most workers, technicians and employers to join one of the 27 multi-function, vertical and
sectoral syndicates, the process was controlled both at the state and party level by the
Falangists. Despite the fascist rhetoric accompanying the creation of the corporatist system
being powerful, with the removal in 1941 of Salvador Merino, the Falangist director of
syndicates, the party’s influence was to diminish and, more significantly, the original concept
of vertical syndicates was to be replaced with employers and workers being represented in
separate sections.
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