Franco’s religious nationalism helped sustain his dictatorship. Its fate after his death offers a different lesson for Syria.
Al-Sharaa’s government faces problems ranging from reunifying the country to securing an Israeli withdrawal and rebuilding Syria’s economy. Alongside these is a political question: how to develop an ideology that holds together the coalition which brought him to power while attracting new supporters.
When al-Sharaa was the de facto ruler of Idlib, this problem was less pressing. Overthrowing Assad and establishing Islamic rule provided a common purpose for HTS and its allies. These principles helped unite Islamist rebel groups governing a predominantly Sunni territory. They are less suited to governing a country as diverse as Syria.
Already, al-Sharaa is struggling to maintain public support. Syria in Transition polling in Damascus, Rural Damascus and Homs found that government disapproval rose from 44 percent in April 2026 to 52 percent in June. Meanwhile, a Sunni Arab Islamist ideology risks alienating regional allies like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as ethnic and religious minorities, some of which like the Kurds and the Druze have armed organisations experienced in resisting governments they consider threatening.
Al-Sharaa therefore needs an ideology that retains his former loyalists while accommodating people outside their ranks. The experience of Franco’s Spain offers a useful comparison.
Franco’s National Catholicism
After the Spanish Civil War, Franco faced the problem of balancing the factions that had brought him to power: the Falange, the Church, monarchists and the military. Their shared opposition to the Republic concealed disagreements about how Spain should be governed.
Catholic nationalism and anti-communism had helped bind this coalition together during the war, which Franco’s supporters presented as a crusade against the enemies of Spain and Catholicism. Following the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, the regime increasingly emphasised its Catholic identity as its fascist associations became a liability.
National Catholicism allowed Franco to present himself as the defender of Spanish traditions and religious values while retaining personal authority. The Church gained extensive influence over education, censorship and public morality, and its privileges were formalised in the 1953 concordat with the Vatican. From 1957, technocrats associated with Opus Dei gained important economic posts.
Opus Dei was, in some respects, a Catholic counterpart to the Muslim Brotherhood: a network of committed believers whose professional and social connections helped extend religious influence into public life. Franco could draw on such networks while keeping ultimate political power in his own hands.
Al-Sharaa and neo-Umayyadism
Something resembling a Sunni Arab version of National Catholicism may now be emerging in Syria. Often described as “neo-Umayyadism”, this remains an interpretation of the government’s direction rather than an officially declared doctrine.
Al-Sharaa’s supporters include former HTS fighters, mainstream Islamists and conservative Sunni Arab nationalists. These groups have different expectations of government. Religious conservatism provides common ground, yet leaves unresolved the relationship between Islamic authority, national identity and presidential power.
Neo-Umayyadism offers a way of bringing these constituencies together. The Umayyads ruled a vast empire from Damascus, giving their memory an appeal that combines Islamic history, Arab prestige and Syrian national pride. Islamists emphasise Syria’s religious inheritance, including it being the birthplace of modern Salafism; nationalists can celebrate Syria’s former greatness. Both can support a government promising to restore it.
The creation of the Supreme Fatwa Council gives religious clerics a formal role in public life. Meanwhile, local reconciliation councils, some operating under state supervision, draw on Islamic jurisprudence alongside customary and statutory law to settle disputes left by the war. Such developments expand religion’s place in public affairs without necessarily placing religious authorities above the president.
As with Franco, the political attraction is that Al-Sharaa can present his government as defending the majority’s values while preserving his freedom of action. This could sustain a religious, nationalist republic whose authoritarian character survives the moderation of its original revolutionary programme.
This outcome is not inevitable. If Syria’s transition produces meaningful political competition, the same appeal to faith and national tradition could become the basis of an electoral programme, comparable in some respects to European Christian democracy. Much depends on the institutions established during transition.
After the strongman
The comparison with Spain also offers a less pessimistic possibility. National Catholicism proved useful to Franco during his lifetime, yet it failed to provide a durable political settlement after his death in 1975. Its authority had already weakened as Spanish society secularised and parts of the Church distanced themselves from the regime. Without Franco, the system lost the man who had held its competing interests together.
Democracy followed through political negotiation and public pressure. Franco’s dictatorship had suppressed democratic politics for decades, but it had postponed democracy rather than extinguish it entirely. Religious conservatism survived within a multi-party system but its claim to determine how Spain must be governed withered.
Something similar could happen in Syria. An ideology assembled to hold al-Sharaa’s coalition together may prove dependent on his personal authority. It may struggle to outlive him. That would offer little consolation to Syrians facing another prolonged period of strongman rule. It would, however, caution against assuming that the political settlement taking shape today must determine Syria’s future indefinitely.
