The Structure of Local Power

The photograph shows Miquel Mateu, the first Francoist mayor of Barcelona (1939-1945), who was forced to travel by carriage due to the shortage of being caused by the policies of the Franco government.

The conflicts over local power spread like an oil slick in post-war Spain. Generally, these conflicts found their greatest expression in the struggles between provincial leaders of FET-JONS and civil governors over appointments to municipal councils. It was an unequal struggle, however, since the civil governors held all the power in these appointments, leaving FET-JONS with only an advisory role.

This conflict was explained then, and still is, as a struggle over power between FET-JONS and the traditional right. The strategy followed by the single party was to denounce mayors as old-school politicians and label their administration as inefficient and corrupt. These accusations were not so much aimed at ending irregularities as at discrediting and neutralizing their political adversaries. For this reason, when the solution adopted was to replace the administrators, but the new ones were not those desired by Falange, the party intensified its campaign even further.

Although there were Francoists who advocated fascistization of the regime, the party's heterogeneity and weak presence, its fragility and the leadership struggles within a FET-JONS already restructured by the dictatorship, and the persistence of a clientelist political culture throughout the country, make this conflict more than just a fascist assault on local power.

The solution to the problem was the unification of local and provincial leadership of the party and the state in a single person. While this led to some renewal of the membership of municipal councils, it was directed and controlled by the traditional elites. The unification of roles did not involve appointing the provincial party leaders who had denounced irregularities and corruption as civil governors. Instead, the new civil governors were generally career military officers or jurists who, whether fascists or not, came to control the party at the provincial level. Rather than the party taking over the state, the state took over the party.

This process led to the construction of a clientelist political organization. By concentrating local powers in a single individual, the dictatorship established a model of state and single party clientelism that concealed the struggles within the two structures. It also succeeded in subjugating Falange. The role of civil governors and mayors was to integrate clientelist networks into the new framework of relations, allowing for coexistence—or at most the covert conflict—with other networks and with the newcomers: the Falangists.

This model was consolidated in 1947 with the implementation of the 1945 Foundation Law of Local Government. This law not only facilitated a constant renewal of local political personnel but also institutionalized the integration of clientelism through the union bureaucracy and professional associations.

ORB