My super conservative in-laws in Spain are all flustered by this! They think these people are being paid and that they are armed and dangerous and out to pillage, kill, and raze the country.
Spain is weird in that their Fascist dictatorship wasn’t overthrown by a Revolution like next door Portugal but instead those in power decided themselves to let go of power (after making themselves stupidly rich and then passing some laws to make themselves immune from prosecution for all they did), so IMHO the right-wing there has always been pretty Fascist-adjacent because certain things weren’t cleaned up.
The sons and daughters of the Fascist elites too created their own political party in next door Portugal - currently in power - but its ideology was never this weird moralist know-your-place “conservativeness” that you see in traditional Fascism.
instead those in power decided themselves to let go of power (after making themselves stupidly rich and then passing some laws to make themselves immune from prosecution for all they did
So it wasn’t overthrown at all. It changed the paint, but nothing else. Something something, scratch a Liberal.
Well, the Fascists now have a party (more like two parties, one even more far-right than the other) and have to actually convince enough voters (like the inlaws of the person I replied to) so that they win the election, which doesn’t always happen - for example right now the Government is in the hands of the (supposedly) center-left mainstream party (not sure if they’re really left of center since nowadays european mainstream “moderate” parties are all neoliberal to at least some extent).
In the time of the dictatorship they had absolute power and didn’t need to convince anybody to have power (but, perhaps, the military leadership).
So things did change, though the change was indeed not at all started by them being overthrown.
My super conservative in-laws in Spain are all flustered by this! They think these people are being paid and that they are armed and dangerous and out to pillage, kill, and raze the country.
Spain is weird in that their Fascist dictatorship wasn’t overthrown by a Revolution like next door Portugal but instead those in power decided themselves to let go of power (after making themselves stupidly rich and then passing some laws to make themselves immune from prosecution for all they did), so IMHO the right-wing there has always been pretty Fascist-adjacent because certain things weren’t cleaned up.
The sons and daughters of the Fascist elites too created their own political party in next door Portugal - currently in power - but its ideology was never this weird moralist know-your-place “conservativeness” that you see in traditional Fascism.
So it wasn’t overthrown at all. It changed the paint, but nothing else. Something something, scratch a Liberal.
Well, the Fascists now have a party (more like two parties, one even more far-right than the other) and have to actually convince enough voters (like the inlaws of the person I replied to) so that they win the election, which doesn’t always happen - for example right now the Government is in the hands of the (supposedly) center-left mainstream party (not sure if they’re really left of center since nowadays european mainstream “moderate” parties are all neoliberal to at least some extent).
In the time of the dictatorship they had absolute power and didn’t need to convince anybody to have power (but, perhaps, the military leadership).
So things did change, though the change was indeed not at all started by them being overthrown.