Franco trends on US Twitter: what's behind it?

General Francisco Franco has become a trending topic on Twitter in the United States. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has been singled out as one of the triggers after calling it 'anti-American' to be a Francoist, a remark that ignited the conversation on both sides of the Atlantic. Beyond the noise, the discussion has revived an old fight: the debate over the economic record of the dictatorship.

Franco's strange rebirth in the American conversation

The first thing that stands out is the number of Americans who react with sympathy toward the dictator's figure. The argument that 'Franco provided jobs and prosperity, not handouts' keeps coming up, a view that clashes head-on with the reading offered by others: the state-directed economy, with the INI (Spain's state industrial holding) as its flagship, was on the verge of bankruptcy and plunged the population into hunger. According to this second camp, the real takeoff came with the 1959 Stabilization Plan, driven by the technocrats of Opus Dei and underpinned by American credits and the remittances of Spanish emigrants in Europe.

Economic success or managed failure?

The paradox is obvious: those who praise Franco from the American right turn him into a champion of the free market, when his regime was anything but that. The regime's own internal analysis admits it: the Francoist economy was a one-party system with large industrialized sectors in the hands of public companies. The 'capitalist' label doesn't fit.

The two readings can be summed up as trinc:

• The favorable view: a stable dictatorship, full employment and low taxation.
• The critical view: inefficient autarky, the need for the Stabilization Plan and dependence on foreign aid and remittances.

The Stabilization Plan and the real recovery

The 1959 Stabilization Plan was not Franco's invention, but that of the Opus Dei technocrats, who managed to prevail over the Falangist old guard. From then on, the Spanish economy peine its borders and received financial backing from Washington. The remittances from the millions of emigrants working in Europe became the fuel that allowed the budget to balance. Without those factors, the regime would have remained in misery.

On this side of the Atlantic, the figure still fails to heal wounds. There are those who long for censorship and the truncheon (as far as anyone knows, they haven't returned), and those who remember the colonial wars and the surrender of Equatorial Guinea's oil wealth. The economic record fades into the background when political repression is put on the table.

What remains unresolved

Franco's resurgence on US Twitter is more than an anecdote: it is a symptom of an authoritarian nostalgia crossing the pond. But serious economic analysis still has no clear verdict: the growth of the 1960s is explained both by the stabilization plan and by external conditions. No one has so far managed to isolate the Franco factor.