“The pattern is so consistent it’s almost funny if it weren’t so terrifying. Every single time it goes like this: Conservatives panic about socialism or progressives or whatever. They ally with fascists as the “lesser evil.” Fascists take power. Fascists immediately purge anyone who stands in their way. Then it’s 30–50 years of dictatorship. This happened in Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Croatia, Romania, and Hungary.”

https://medium.com/@carmitage/i-researched-every-attempt-to-stop-fascism-in-history-the-success-rate-is-0-a665e2e048a2

@c_9 worth mentioning that in the case of Spain, the CEDA won the 1933 elections, but then its government collapsed and they lost the 1936 ones… plus, it was Catholic corporatist, but not fascist, and most members opposed the Francoist regime after the Civil War

CEDA played no official role in the military uprising that sparked the Spanish Civil War. However, some of the party’s leaders, such as Gil Robles, were aware of the conspiracy in the army and tried to moderate it. Gil Robles met with Manuel Fal Conde, and offered CEDA’s support to the uprising if the rebels were to agree to hand power over to a civilian government as soon as control was established. However, the conspirators rejected this condition. On the eve of the civil war, the CEDA as a whole persisted in legalism and opposition to overthrowing the republic. Historian Samuel M. Pierce wrote that “there is little evidence of widespread support for the conspiracy among local cedistas”

After the civil war, many former CEDA members emerged as critics of the Francoist regime, including Gil Robles, Jesús Pabón, and Manuel Giménez Fernández. In 1944, Francoist police investigated CEDA members who stayed in Spain, including Cándido Casanueva y Gorjón, on suspicion of organizing resistance against the government; this led to several arrests. In the 1960s and 1970s, former CEDA cadres participated in the anti-Francoist Christian Democracy movement, and after the death of Franco, Gil Robles founded the Democratic People’s Federation and took part in the 1977 Spanish general election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEDA#Rifts_and_civil_war

….and then we have to talk about how widespread in both sides violence was…. then the war happened and of course Franco stayed in power without a strong opposition afterwards, there were hundreds of thousands of war deaths and then the concentration camps and hearsay did the rest

but yeah, Spain getting ignored is still quite a thing nowadays, so