# Falange The **Falange Española** (founded 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the dictator's son) was Spain's genuine fascist party — [[Benito Mussolini]]-modeled, national-syndicalist, violently anti-parliamentary — and the case study in **fascism absorbed by a stronger authoritarianism**: marginal electorally before 1936, swollen by the [[Spanish Civil War]], and then forcibly merged by [[Francisco Franco]] (April 1937) with the Carlists into the regime's single state party (FET y de las JONS), its founder executed by the Republic and converted into the regime's premier martyr cult ("José Antonio ¡Presente!" on church walls across Spain). The Falange supplied the regime's liturgy, blue shirts, and social rhetoric while Franco hollowed it into an instrument — the standard fate of movement-fascism that rides a military-clerical coalition to power. Its residue runs from the *Movimiento Nacional*'s forty-year patronage machine to the present far-right fringe and the symbolic inventory (yoke-and-arrows, *Cara al Sol*) that resurfaces around [[Vox (Spain)]]-era street politics.