New Force (Spain)
New Force Fuerza Nueva | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Founder | Blas Piñar |
| Founded | 1966 |
| Dissolved | 1982 |
| Succeeded by | National Front |
| Youth wing |
Fuerza Joven Frente de la Juventud |
| Ideology |
Spanish nationalism Falangism[1] |
| Political position | Far-right[1] |
| Congreso de los Diputados (1979) |
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New Force (Spanish: Fuerza Nueva, FN) was the name of a succession of far-right political parties in Spain founded by Blas Piñar, the son of one of the defenders of the Alcázar of Toledo and director of the Institute of Hispanic Culture during the Francoist period. The common goal of all these organizations was to "keep alive the ideals of July 18th 1936 and to gather the national forces."
Founding
FN appeared as the collective leader in 1966 around Fuerza Nueva Editorial SA, a magazine of the same name beginning to be published in 1967. From the beginning, their public call was to the most nostalgic Falangists and to those in favor of hardening the repression.
After a spiritual retirement, Piñar, director of the magazine, organized and constituted in 1976 the only openly extreme right-wing party represented in the new Spanish democracy. It was Piñar and other seven other nostalgic fascists, headed by the general and member of Opus Dei Alvaro Lacalle Leloup. They pleaded for the continuation of Francoism in all its forms, without clarifying if its position was one of Falangism, Carlism, the Opus Dei technocracy that had dominated the later days of Francoist Spain, or all of them simultaneously. The only clear position was its rejection of Juan Carlos's constitutional monarchy and its defense of "organic democracy". Because of this, FN was an amalgam of Catholic fundamentalists, technocrats, neoliberal-raised young people, fascists and ultranationalists, in which any rightist idea had relevance and that called itself a "national group of forces".
In 1977 it failed totally in the elections with the coalition 'National Alliance July 18', an organization that included FN, FE-JONS (the Falange) and the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista. In 1979, they repeated the previous coalition with the new name National Union, and Piñar was elected as deputy of Madrid. The parliamentary interventions of Blas Piñar were centred in this period on his own party, most of the time talking about the actions against his group, trying to criminalize antifascist activity and even obtaining propaganda of the formation of these frequent denunciations, appearing as a victim like a group persecuted by the Department of the Interior.
According to other references of this period, they talked about the conjuncture of the political course, the rest of the time suggesting dirty plots of the State and the autonomous governments.
From the 1980s till today
In any case, the defined political group best known as a last holdout of the regime disappeared officially as a party in 1982, becoming restricted by constant losses to only publishing. None of its leaders knew how to admit the loss of its parliamentary representation when it only obtained 0.13% of the vote (20,139 ballots), or why internal fights aggravated the FN crisis and sparked the appearance of a breakaway movement that culminated in the creation of Hispanic Union (UH). FN is since then only a testimonial extreme right-wing magazine of little influence directed by Luis Fernandez Villamea.
Present in all the Spanish provinces during the transition to democracy, its message was one of fear to a subversion against Spain organized by the "interests of the Judeo-Masonic and communist hydra". The work of FN in favor of anti-Marxist and racist propaganda began in 1970 with the publication in its own publishing house of the book What is Communism?, although several other books had to do with previous conferences on the matter where socialism was explained from the ultra-Catholic view as an ideology inspired by the devil. It did not have any revisions explaining the certain falseness of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion nor in the introducing part of the Literature of the Holocaust, and based all its propaganda on the defense of the National-Catholic values urging "A New Crusade by the Mother country".
FN, implicated in political aggression and attacks to bookstores, created a youthful pick up group called Fuerza Joven (Young Force). Through it, they passed numerous leaders of later attempts of neofascist unification like Jose Luis Corral, leader of the Spanish Catholic Movement, or Ricardo Sáenz de Ynestrillas, founder and ex-leader of "Alliance for National Unity".
Years later, FN reappeared refounded as Forward Spain (ADES). Also directed by Blas Piñar, ADES maintained the same goals as the political project of FN, that is to say, the resurrection of the form of the authoritarian state dictatorship from 1939 to 1975.
As years passed for New Force, the new project of Blas Piñar was repudiated by most of the neo-Nazi groups, especially skinheads. Nevertheless, its calls to take the streets in the occasion of celebrations like the 20th of November (the anniversary of the deaths of Francisco Franco and of José Antonio Primo de Rivera) generally are seconded by most militants of the extreme right, including during the 1980s and 1990s numerous skinheads as well as fascist supporters of the older generations.
References
- 1 2 Matuschek, Peter (2004), "Who Learns from Whom?: The Failure of Spanish Christian Democracy and the Success of the Partido Popular", Christian Democratic Parties in Europe since the End of the Cold War, Leuven University Press, p. 244
translated from the Spanish language page, spring 2006.