The Spanish right is a strange beast. Today it is largely unified politically under the banner of the Popular Party (PP), though it is increasingly losing votes to Ciutadans (Cs), a center-right, anti-nationalist Catalan party. Yet its ideological and political unification hinges on a balancing act that combines National Catholicism and economic liberalism.

The first of these was the official state ideology under fascist dictator Francisco Franco and still persists (although often in muted form) in the thought of PP ideologues. The second became increasingly common on the Spanish right after the government took the first steps to liberalize Spain’s economy in 1959.

Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Franco’s outspoken minister of tourism and information, was at the forefront of the regime’s gradual embrace of free-market ideology. A great admirer of Carl Schmitt, Fraga, the eventual founder of the PP, at first despised right-wing economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Wilhelm Röpke for their anti-statism; after the transition to democracy, however, his desire to make a mainstream right-wing party compelled him to adopt economic liberalism, leading to the creation of the PP, which is today the ruling party in Spain. Fraga embodied this Francoist tension between newfangled economic liberalism and National Catholicism that still honeycombs the Spanish right.