Farinacci complained further to Rome that Franco “has no idea of what the Spain of tomorrow should be like,” an utterly mistaken assessment. Farinacci also wrote that Franco “is only interested in winning the war, and then for a long period after, in how to impose an authoritarian, or, better, dictatorial government to purge the nation of all those who have had any contact, direct or indirect, with the Reds,” an observation that was spot-on. Franco understood the civil war not solely as a military endeavor but as a political project. During his counterinsurgency in Morocco, he had learned how to massacre a populace into submission
Such a statement could be taken as excuse making for Franco’s mediocrity in the new conditions of modern combat, which required combined use of air, armor, and infantry (in German-style warfare, which Soviet advisers also knew). But a quick military conquest of Spain would not have been easy.131 Among the Soviet-sponsored International Brigades, casualty rates would be high, up to 75 percent in some units, while home leave was denied and desertion would become prevalent. But Spain’s regular Republic’s People’s Army had become formidable, the majority of its field commands held by regular officers, many of them accomplished. Franco, however, would win the grinding civil war not only because he attained a unified military command. On the political battlefield, as it were, he forged a loose but effective coalition, an integrative strategy of no enemies to the right, co-opting Spanish fascists, who were more housebroken than their Italian counterparts.132 Thus, whereas in Italy and then Germany the traditional right, fearing the left, had invited the radical right to power, in Spain Franco built a successful popular front—on the right.
Franco re-created the ancien régime court, with processions to church under a canopy surrounded by bishops.133 Beneath this powerful symbolism, he also forced into being a single legal political organization, relying on his young brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Súñer, who had escaped from a Republic prison, to oversee the political amalgam.134 This was no simple feat: the monarchists alone were split, with more than one presumptive heir waiting in the wings.135 But the Francoist political party managed to bring into coalition seemingly incompatible groupings of Alfonso monarchists and the Carlist monarchists, along with Catholics, upper officer corps, and the Falange Blueshirts. Fissures remained, but they were not enough to split the coalition, while being just enough to facilitate Franco’s staying power.
This contrasted starkly with the Republic. Many Spaniards suspected both indigenous Communists and Moscow of the worst, but with Communists working against broad nationalization of private industry, many of Spain’s shopkeepers, farmers, and lesser civil servants cooperated with them in defense of the Republic. Yet the Republic could not take full advantage. It lacked not only a vigorous parliamentary life during the civil war but unified leadership, comprising as it did three governments in three capitals: Valencia (after evacuation from Madrid), Bilbao (Basques), and Barcelona (the Catalan Generalitat). Anarchists, who were concentrated in Barcelona, pursued a strategy of winning the war via grassroots revolution, but in areas where revolution had been effected, the Nationalist rebel forces sliced through the lines with ease.136 Even if the Nationalists had disintegrated, it is hard to see how the leftist victors could have avoided a civil war, which simmered and occasionally boiled on the left nearly the entire time they were battling Franco.137