By: Abraham Cruz-Hernandez
In “Spain: Fury and Failure” it examines the collapse of the Democracy in Spain during the 1930’s. That emphasized the double forces of the intense social conflict “Fury” and the political breakdown “Failure”. Throughout the article we can see how it argues that the Spanish descent into Civil War was not caused specifically by one thing but the accumulations of a lot of tensions that many democratic institutions around Europe could not handle.
The “Fury” that is mentioned in the article can be described as the violence and hostility that occurred throughout the Spanish society as Franco took over. The clash was between working class, elites, left wingers, and right wingers. The issue occurred as left winger believed a reform was needed and right wingers believed that their reforms threatened society. Similar to how the United States is currently under where each political party hates the other and believes that the other party will be the end of the country. It actually did occur for Spain.
Each political party in Spain ultimately did believe that it would be the end of Spain if whoever won the elections won. It unfortunately led to the 1936 Spanish Civil War where Franco took over and declared himself as leader and where his dictatorship would last until his last breath, which was around 40 years.
You may be asking yourself what this has to do with soccer. Well Franco would use Real Madrid FC as the team that would be linked with Spanish Nationalism and part of the Central State. This also led to the regions of Spain to have extreme pride in their teams for example FC Barcelona is associated with the strong Catalan Identity and left leaning politics. Soccer will always be political no matter how hard many people will try to separate them.
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