Spain, one of Europe’s most important countries and a country wracked by economic disaster, votes in early elections on November 20, 2011. Spain, which had already voted this year in regional and municipal elections on May 22, was originally scheduled to hold general elections in March 2012. But, after the opposition’s victory in the regional elections, the opposition increased pressure on the incumbent Socialist government to call snap elections.

The incumbent and retiring President of the Government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, in office since 2004, acquiesced to both the opposition’s pressure and rising demands within his own party for snap elections. On July 29, he announced the organization of general elections on November 20.

Spain’s Parliament or Cortes is composed of two houses. The lower house is the Congress of Deputies (Congreso de los Diputados), which is made up of 350 deputies elected by closed list proportional representation (d’Hondt method) in 50 constituencies which correspond to Spain’s provinces. A party needs to win at least 3% of the vote in a constituency to be eligible for seats. Blank votes are counted as valid votes in the allocation of seats.

Each province is represented by a minimum of two deputies while the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla are represented by one member. The remaining 248 seats are distributed to provinces based on population. The provinces of Madrid with 35 members and Barcelona with 31 members elect the most members, while the province of Soria elects the least, two.

There are, on average, 100,200 voters for each member, but the electoral system over-represents smaller provinces (most of them in Castile) to the detriment of larger provinces. In Soria, there were only 38,685 voters per deputy in 2008 while in Barcelona there were 128,392 voters per deputy that same year. This overrepresentation of smaller provinces could be seen as favouring the right-wing Popular Party (Partido Popular, PP) in case of a tie in the popular vote because the right’s stronghold has traditionally been these overrepresented provinces. But Socialist-leaning provinces such as Huesca, are also overrepresented (58,755 voters/deputy in Huesca in 2008).

The provincial constituencies system is also biased towards larger parties and regionalist parties. The small number of seats in a lot of provinces means that the ‘real threshold’ for representation is significantly higher. In 2004, the threshold in 3-seat constituencies was on average 25%. Even in Valencia, which elected 16 members, the average threshold (5.4%) was higher than the one set by law (3%). However, the threshold in Madrid, which elected 35 members that year, was 2.6% – below the one set by law. This higher threshold has significantly underrepresented smaller national parties such as the United Left (IU). For example, IU won only two seats in 2008 though it had won more votes than the regionalist CiU and PNV. Critics of Spain’s electoral system often use that example, although it is slightly unfair given that IU and its allies ran candidates in all 50 provinces while the regionalist CiU and PNV ran candidates only in their region where they polled much better than the IU did. Still, if Spain was a single constituency, the IU could have won up to 14 seats.

The Senate (Senado) is the upper house of the Cortes. Though the Congress and Senate both have the power to initiate legislation and the Senate can impose its veto or amendments to legislation, the Congress has the upper hand over the Senate in that only it can initiate votes of confidence and it is able to override a senatorial veto. The Senate has 264 members, of which 208 will be elected on November 20. The Senate is a chamber of territorial representation, but unlike in the United States or Germany, it does not represent the autonomous communities of the country. Instead, it represents provinces. Each of peninsular Spain’s forty-seven provinces elect four senators without regard to population. Ceuta and Melilla elect two senators each. In Spain’s three insular provinces (the Balearic Islands and the two Canarian provinces), the larger islands (Mallorca in the Balearics and Gran Canaria and Tenerife in the Canaries) elect three senators while the smaller islands (Menorca, Ibiza-Formentera in the Balearics; Fuerteventura, La Gomera, El Hierro, Lanzarote and La Palma in the Canaries) each elect one member. This system significantly overrepresents smaller provinces, given that Madrid and Soria each have the same number of Senators.

In provinces with four senators, voters may vote up to three candidates. In those with two or three, for up to two. In those with one, for a single candidate. Voters vote for individual candidates (each party slate has three names in four-seaters) and those four winning the most votes are elected. This usually means that seats are split 3-1 between the winning slate and the runners-up.

In addition, 56 seats are nominated by autonomous communities. Each autonomous community is entitled to one plus one additional member for every million inhabitants. Cantabria, Navarre and La Rioja only have one nominated member. Andalusia has 9. Population growth in certain regions increased the weight of nominated senators from 51 to 56 in 2008. The right’s victory in the May elections will likely increase the PP’s control of nominated seats.

Spain has been governed since 2004 by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). Zapatero’s PSOE was elected, by surprise, on March 14 2004 only days after terrorist attacks on March 11 had killed 191 people. He was reelected, though did not win an overall majority, in the March 2008 elections.

Spain in 2011 is wracked by severe economic difficulties. Spain is struggling under nearly 20% unemployment, a huge budget deficit and is possible on the brink of bankruptcy a la Greece/Ireland/Portugal (and the United States, apparently). The government has been compelled to adopt tough austerity measures which have succeeded in bringing Spain back from the brink but at the cost of severe budget trimming which have caused social disruptions. Budget trimming is especially difficult in a decentralized country such as Spain, where regional communities (always clamoring for more financial powers) account for 37% of public spending. Hounded for his initially sluggish response and then his austerity-minded budgets, the Socialist President of the Government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, in office since 2004, has won some of the worst approval numbers of any Spanish head of government and finally announced in April 2011 that he would not stand for reelection.

In the wake of the crisis, Spain has seen the emergence of a grassroots, largely youth-driven protest movement styled as los indignados. The indignados protest against austerity measures, the abuses of capitalism, corruption, the political and party system. It is possible that the weight of this movement is spun out of proportion: despite calling on voters to stay home during the May elections, turnout actually increased by 2% in those elections even though the slight increase (under 1%) in blank and invalid votes was perhaps an effect of the movement.

Spain is a fascinating country with a deep, riveting and conflict-ridden history. A plethora of issues or themes pervade Spanish politics and history, the most contemporary of which are regional nationalism, devolution, terrorism, political polarization but also broader themes in European history such as immigration, international terrorism and the economic crisis which have major repercussions in Spain. Understanding the nature of Spain’s contemporary political system, its rapid transformation into a leading, democratic European power after years of decadence or authoritarianism and its inherent contradictions requires to dig deep into history. Why does Spain face so many regional nationalisms and demands for devolution? After all, almost every region in Spain has a regionalist party of some sort (even though some are nothing more than also-rans). Countries such as France, Italy or Germany which also have regions with different histories, cultures and sometimes linguistic traditions are not marked by such conflictual regional relations. Furthermore, regionalism in one particular region of Spain has taken the form of a significant movement aiming to achieve its aims through armed violence and terror, a rarity in the west.

Between now and November, this post will take the form of an ambitious, thorough and probably excessively long and redundant guide to Spanish history, politics and political system. It will be modeled around the famous Guide to the 2010 Brazilian Election, though likely longer. Spanish history is ridden with conflicts and heavy polarization, but I try to remain neutral and steer clear of much controversy. That being said, I can’t help but have a profound distaste for certain authoritarian figures or monarchs. Thankfully they’re dead and their fanclub is limited.

Spanish History and Politics since 1874

Comments of importance

The title for the head of Spain’s government has always been President of the Government or presidente del gobierno. For the sake of simplicity and for readers used to the term ‘Prime Minister’, I prefer to use the term ‘Prime Minister’ or ‘PM’ even though it is not the correct term and the President of the Government is not known as the Prime Minister in Spain, even colloquially.

I prefer to use the English terms for most regions instead of the native term (Castile instead of Castilla, Navarre instead of Navarra, Catalonia instead of Catalunya). For simplicity’s sake, I do, however, use ‘Euskadi’ for the Basque Country.

Election results are obtained from Història Electoral (pre-1977) and from the Interior Ministry (since 1977). In Spain, results presented are as percentage of valid votes, which includes blank votes – envelopes containing no party ballot. In my tables, I exclude these votes and show results as percentages of candidate votes, including solely votes cast directly for a party list.

An asterisk next to a party’s name in elections after 1977 indicate a regional or regionalist party.

My interests in Spanish history are peripheral nationalisms, political evolution, political parties and political violence; thus I focus a lot on that. I do not focus as much on the economic or perhaps social aspects of Spanish history.

My main source is Romero-Salvado’s Twentieth Century Spain: Politics and Society in Spain, 1898 – 1998

You will notice how important land, property and land ownership has been throughout Spanish history. The regions Galicia, Old Castile, Euskadi and Navarre are countries of small property, that is a large population of poor small peasants owning small tracts of land; leftover from the Reconquista when the Castilian throne gave soldiers individual tracts of land. Andalusia, New Castile and Aragon, especially Andalusia, are marked by the dominance of large properties or latifundios with hegemonic land owners and dirt poor peasants.

Primer: Spain between 1492 and 1875

The Reconquista was marked by the emergence of Christian fiefdoms, the most notable of which were Navarre (Basque nationalists argue that it was a Basque kingdom), Castile (which absorbed Leon and Galicia) and Aragon (which was in personal union with Barcelona). Queen Isabella the Catholic of Castile married Ferdinand of Aragon and united the latter two thrones, but the crown of Aragon retained its own fiscal system and peculiarities until 1714. These special regional advantages, peculiarities and specific local legal system are known as fueros. This is a crucial point: unlike in France, where the monarchs asserted their authority and centralized power, the Spanish monarchy even after 1492 did not do so and allowed for the continued presence of local particularisms, fueros and so forth. Spain’s monarchs did rule over huge amounts of land in Europe and overseas (especially the Hapsburgs). Unlike French monarchs who preferred a smaller territory but a unified territory, Spain preferred a larger territory which it could not really unify into a modern nation-state. Perhaps if the fueros of the Basque Country, for example, had been abolished in 1492 and Spain became a centralized monarchy under the Castilian throne the Basque nationalist movement would be either inexistent, a regionalist annoyance or very weak.

Castile emerged as the driving force behind the Reconquista and the ‘unification’ of Spain. Its language, Castilian, gradually became the language of Spain. The crown of Castile, whose land included the heart of the country in addition to Madrid, was the powerful actor in Spain and its elites became those of Spain as a whole. There is thus an unfortunate tendancy in Spanish nationalism and historiography to see Castile as synonymous with Spain and make the history of Castile that of Spain as a whole.

The Bourbons, who took over in 1700, were more centralizing than the Hapsburg. They centralized authority and started unraveling the patchwork of local previleges after 1715 or so. It was still incomplete centralization, and was not driven by any ideological objectives but rather out of necessity for revenue to finance their various genocides and mass-murders.

When Napoleon invaded Spain, various rebel councils assembled in Cadiz and wrote the 1812 Constitution of Cadiz which would become the founding document of the liberal nationalist current of Spanish politics. It was (moderately) anti-clerical, (moderately) democratic, centralist and in favour of free trade. When Ferdinand VII (who was not very bright) returned to Spain, he reneged his promise to uphold the constitution and returned to absolutist reactionary rule which went along with the country’s bankruptcy following the American conflicts. This led to the Liberal Trienium, a period of civil and anarchy where the liberals ran the country with Ferdinand placed under house arrest.France invaded in 1823 and ended the three-year rule, leading to ten years of reactionary absolutist incompetence under Ferdinand.

Ferdinand VII died in 1833, but had only two daughters from a third marriage. Spain was under male primogeniture/Salic law at this time, so the throne at his death would have passed to his brother Infante Carlos, a reactionary. In 1830, Ferdinand VII – not a liberal at any rate but not as reactionary as his brother – passed the ‘Pragmatic Sanction’ which allowed his eldest daughter, Isabella (born 1830), to inherit the throne as Queen of Spain.

When Ferdinand died in 1833, the reactionary followers of Carlos rose in revolt against the liberal Cristinos/Isabelinos (Isabella’s regent Maria Christina). Carlos’ supporters, the Carlists, represented the traditionalist conservative nationalist current of Spanish politics. Carlists fought for the old order. That meant clericalism (including continuing the Inquisition), the divine right of monarchs and an absolute monarchy. An ultra-conservative and anti-liberal ideology, opposed to the Enlightment values which were starting to ‘invade’ Spain. Carlists, more importantly, also supported the old regime of fueros and regional advantages as opposed to the centralizing tendancies of liberalism. Economically, Carlism was attached the old Medieval order of smallholdings, communal land and Church property which was threatened by the state takeover of Church property and the rise of capitalism. As such, Carlism also represented an original revolt against capitalism led by small farmers in isolated areas who feared losing their lands. As such, Marxism actually had sympathy for Carlism. Carlism found its support in Euskadi, Navarre, Aragon and Catalonia (Euskadi and Navarre in particular). The clergy also supported the Carlist cause.

The Carlists had early success in the war, notably thanks to their wonderful Basque general Zumalacárregui, but his death in the siege of Bilbao in 1835 was the beginning of the end for the Carlists who were finally defeated in 1839. Foreign support by France, the UK and Portuguese liberals was important in the Cristino victory.

The defeat of Carlism ushered in the first signs of centralization: creation of provinces (which have barely been altered since), confiscation of church lands (the Church owned tons of land). The reign of Queen Isabella II (who was also not too bright) between 1833 and 1868 was marked, politically, by political instability, underlying Carlist threats, corruption and a series of military coups named pronunciamientos. Coups in reality took the place that elections take today in changing governments, which were led more often than not by military men. Politics were marked by violent clashes between progressives (including general Espartero and later Juan Prim), moderates (conservatives led by general Narváez) and later the Liberal Union, a centrist grouping led by the conservative general Leopoldo O’Donnell. Governments didn’t last very long, but the Isabeline era saw the “moderate decade” (1844-1854), the progressist bienium (1854-1856) and the Liberal Union era (1856-1863 or 1868). Economic growth remained limited to Catalonia and Euskadi, the deficit grew dramatically, corruption was pervasive, politics were dominated by wealthy elites or career officers and again the Spanish state failed to create a modern, European liberal nation-state.

A broad coalition of opponents to the Queen, allied with republicans, progressives and leaderless Liberal Unionists, and all led by general Juan Prim more or less took power in 1868 and exiled the idiot Queen. Rejecting the idea of a republic, the Cortes looked for a King. They settled on Amadeo I of Savoy, the son of Victor Emmanuel I, who became king in 1871. Political instability only increased with Prim’s assassination and a new Carlist war in 1872. The Italian monarch was basically left on his own and got fed up and packed his bags in 1873.

A republic was proclaimed, but the republic was beset immediately by problems: the republican movement itself was weak and more importantly divided into two conflicting streams: centralist conservative republicans and federalist liberal republicans. All went wrong at once: a cantonalist revolt with cities declaring themselves independent and killing each other, the Carlists causing trouble again, a Cuban revolt and a string of coups and rising authoritarianism. A pronunciamiento on December 29 1874 proclaimed Isabella’s son Alfonso XII as King.

The Restoration: Whistling past the cemetery (1875-1923)

Illusory stability: 1875-1898

The Bourbonic Restoration, which denotes an era lasting between 1875 and 1923, was marked by artificial stability and an illiberal sham “liberal monarchy” which masked growing social inequality, the growth of peripheral nationalism, the rise of social troubles, continuing corruption, foreign disasters, economic stagnation or ruin, and military weaknesses.

The architect of the system was the brilliant Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, a wily old career politician. Alongside his friend Práxedes Mateo Sagasta they founded that system of artificial stability which made the political elite blind to the realities of Spain and led Spain down the road of disaster. That system was the turno pacifico (or Canovite System), a peaceful alternance of power between two artificial fake political parties: Canovas’ Conservatives and Sagasta’s Liberals. Neither were real parties, rather they were fledgling coalitions of regional barons and pawns of the powers that be. The two agreed to peacefully alternate in power: one party would get a stint in power, rig the polls to win an election then the King would decide to give the others a stint in power (and rig the polls etc). The system was formal: Sagasta and Canovas signed the Pacto de El Pardo in 1885 to formalize the system of peaceful alternance in power.

The system’s stability rested on three institutions: the King, the military and the church. The King was not merely a constitutional monarch with the responsibility of naming a head of government after elections. The King was the core of the system: he was the arbitrer of the turno pacifico, the person who made it run smoothly. The King was the one with the prerogative of dismissing the President of the Government and calling on the opposition to form government. More importantly, the King held in his hands the power to dissolve Parliament and allow whoever was in power to win the elections. Alfonso XIII, on the throne since 1886 and as full king since 1902, took this power very seriously. Alfonso XIII believed in the ‘regeneration’ of Spain and looked for the best means to achieve this. By the end, he started doubting that parliamentarianism was the way to achieve this.

The army was not one of Europe’s most powerful fighting forces, as evidenced by the countless routs it suffered not only in Cuba but also in Morrocco. But the army was key to the system’s stability. The Canovite system managed to consolidate the army’s support for the monarchy, largely by giving it free reign in military affairs. Most politicians were civilians but officers often got comfy seats in the Senate, and held the war ministry for most of the Restoration era. But as we’ll see later, the army was divided between the peninsular office elite corps and the rough-and-tumble ‘Africans’ who fought in colonial conflicts in North Africa.

Article 11 of the 1876 Constitution proclaimed La religión católica, apostólica, romana, es la del Estado. Such an article was crucial to the Canovite system’s ability to regain the control of the Church, which had backed Carlism up until this point. The Church rebuilt its wealth, to the point of owning a third of Spain and the state granted the Church free reign in education. Bishops were also given seats in the Senate. The Church was the grassroots institution in closest contact with workers and peasants, something which serves to explain the rabid anticlericalism of the republican movement in future years.

Elections were shams, rigged by the governing party (who still conceded seats to the other parties and even to friendly Carlists and republicans) to ensure them a majority. The system rested on the caciques, political bosses (often landowners, officials, priests or lawyers) who ran their personal fiefs with unlimited powers to dispense justice, appoint officials, govern locally, settle disputes and rule over their peons. They provided the elites with the votes in election time, sometimes through coercion but the Canovite system also rested on hegemonic power. More often than not, caciques did not have to resort to rigging the votes because their peons were scared to vote against the will of the man who had so much control over their ways. Caciquismo allowed an unprofitable protectionist agrarian economy to prosper, with industry limited to Catalonia (textile and other manufacturing), Euskadi (metallurgy, shipbuilding and some manufacturing) and Asturias (coal mining).

The Castilian wheat-growers, hurt by poor harvests and cheaper grain from abroad, had joined with the Catalan and Basque industrialists to erect huge tariff barriers in 1891 and 1907 to make Spain the most protected economy in Europe. The high tariff barriers allowed for the comfortable continuation of the status-quo, saved Castilian agriculture and prevented major social change. Free trade could have allowed for faster economic growth by reallocating resources and worked to make Spanish industries more competitive but it was far too risky of a gamble for the elite. Poor transportation – railways having been designed by the Madrilene elites, run in large part thanks to foreign speculators and tailored for exporting goods – and other bottlenecks denied cheap food to the industrial periphery – but the industrialists were protected so they couldn’t care less.

What the USS Maine wrought: 1898-1914

The system worked smoothly until 1898. Under the dual leadership of Canovas and Sagasta, Spain enjoyed unprecedented political stability as wealth increased slightly and Spain moved forward a tiny bit. Republican or Carlist revolutionary threats were killed off. The first blow was Canovas’ assasination by an Italian anarchist in 1897. In 1898, Spain was soundly defeated by the United States in the Spanish-American War which sealed Spain’s colonial empire with the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Pacific Islands. The loss of Cuba, which had become the last bulwark and the symbol of Spain’s Empire, was a major blow. Cuba had increasingly been seen by Spain as an integral part of Spain, not just a colony. Its loss was a major blow. The war (and disease) also crippled the Spanish military, the navy in particular having been practically anhilated. The ‘Disaster of ‘98’ as it is often referred to in Spain led to the regeneracionismo movement, an intellectual movement dedicated to restoring Spain to its former greatness and “regenerating” a stronger Spain. Major regenerationist writers included Pío Baroja and Miguel de Unamuno, two Basques.

The Disaster of 98 precipitated the growth of opposing ideologies. In addition to Carlism and republicanism, the two old opposing ideologies, the early twentieth century was marked by the rise of socialism, anarchism (or anarcho-syndicalism) and regionalism.

The Republicans had been terribly divided since the fall of the Republic. Some divisions were inevitable personality clashes. A lot more was due to differences over details: some were centralists, some were federalists, some were Catalan autonomists, some prioritized violent actions (pronunciamientos), some were legalists, a lot were just reformists who ended up supporting the dynastic parties. The Republicans did have some electoral successes (1893, 1903, 1905, 1910, 1919) and always had a rump, but they were never a serious alternative. Their history is not remarkable, but one politician of the era merits some attention.

Alejandro Lerroux was a demagogic, radical and aggressive leader known for a fiery rhetoric mixing anticlericalism, vague reformism and violent attacks on the dynastic parties. Lerroux made his career in Barcelona. Lerroux was active in the Republican Union founded in 1903 by Salmerón, but quit the party in 1906 and founded the Radical Republican Party in 1908. The Radicals were Lerroux’s machine, and had its base in working-class Barcelona. Some theorize that Lerroux was a type-A swindling funded by the start by the Liberals to divert working-class support in Barcelona from the anarcho-syndicalists as well as the regionalists.

The Socialist movement began with the foundation of the PSOE in 1879 in Madrid by Pablo Iglesias. The PSOE only won its first seat in 1910, but has won seats in all democratic elections since. The PSOE subscribed to hardline Marxist rhetoric on the inevitability of the workers’ revolution but, like the SFIO, followed a contradictory legalist and reformist strategy. The PSOE’s union affiliate, the General Union of Workers (UGT), founded in 1888, focused on improving living standards and winning better wages, not fermenting unrest. The PSOE was hurt by its weak base and the division of the left-wing movement in Spain between the Socialists and the anarcho-syndicalists.

Anarchism was introduced in Spain in 1868 by an Italian anarchist representing the First Internationale in Spain and spread quickly in the late nineteenth century. Anarchists violently rejected the state, capitalism, the Church and the lot of it; instead wishing for a libertarian-communist paradise. The violent rejection of the state and utopist rhetoric struck a chord with Andalusian landless peasants, unconvinced by the doctrinaire socialists, and Andalusia became the base of anarchism in Spain. Anarchism was also dominant in Catalonia and Barcelona, which had a long history of support for federalists and various proto-anarchist ideologies. Anarchists prioritized violent actions, massive strikes and direct action which won it lots of spots in jails and lots of bullets on the behalf of the state. The decline of free-for-all terrorism led to the rise of syndicalism as a method to achieve the violent overthrow of the state.

Significant in all this is the ‘Semana Tragica’ of 1909. In 1909, Spain was embroiled in fighting with local tribes in the Rif (Morrocco). Conservative PM Antonio Maura called up reservists, which in Barcelona were mostly poor workers. In July 1909, a violent general strike broke out led by the anarchist Solidaridad Obrera union. The strike descended into chaos, as Lerroux’s Young Barbarians (looters linked to the Radicals) started looting and burning churches. Maura, and his radical Interior Minister Juan de la Cierva sent in troops from outside the city to successfully crush the revolt. The trial and subsequent execution of anarchist teacher Francesc Ferrer created an international uproar which led to Alfonso XIII firing Maura in October 1909 and replacing him with the Liberal Segismundo Moret.

The Semana Tragica triggered Solidaritad Obrera’s peninsular expansion to compete with the reformist UGT. In 1910, the National Confederation of Labour or CNT was founded. The CNT subscribed to anarcho-syndicalism, which prioritized large strike actions which rarely had definite material objectives. The CNT was very decentralized, with no bureaucracy or socialist-like ‘democratic centralism’.

The Disaster of 98 also sparked the rebirth of regionalist movements, notably in Euskadi and Catalonia. In Euskadi, the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) was founded in 1895 by Sabino Arana. Sabino Arana, born in a Carlist family, was an insane racist xenophobe. Arana published his most famous work, Bizkaya por su independencia, a mish-mash of history, pseudo-myths, eugenics and racism. The Basque people do indeed form a unique collective ethnicity, speaking a language (Euskara) which is the last remaining pre-Indo-European language in Europe and with unknown origins. But prior to Arana, there had been little in the way of collective identity (people rather identified with their province) and no real nationalist movement demanding separation from Spain. The removal of the fueros in the 1870s triggered the birth of Basque nationalism, which is strongly influenced by foralism. Arana further created ethnic myths, defining the Basques as a unique and pure people allegedly descended from the humans on Noah’s Ark. For good measure, he put the manly and pure Basques against the dirty impure Spaniards/foreigners, referred to as maketos (or ‘Koreans’). Arana’s hatred of Spain and the maketos is symbolic of the emergence of Basque nationalism as a reactionary movement against immigration of Spaniards from outside Euskadi to work in the booming metallurgical industry around Bilbao. The maketos were seen as dangerous foreigners polluting the pure race with their language, customs and especially with socialism and anticlericalism. Arana is also the man behind the creation of most of the symbols of modern Euskadi: he created the Basque flag, he coined the name ‘Euskadi’ (the alternative term is Euskal Herria, land of Basque speakers) and wrote the Basque anthem. Arana got himself arrested pretty much intentionally, and in 1902 interestingly signaled a change of line from hardline independence to autonomy within Spain but died in 1903 without explaining whether change of mind was genuine or a tactic. The early PNV was, in Arana’s vein, a hardline nationalist reactionary conservative party. It suffered splits early in its existence but was reunited in 1930.

Catalan nationalism was born in the wake of the cultural renaissance in Catalonia in the nineteenth century (the Renaixença) and the decline of the Spanish state. Catalonia has never been a kingdom, but the County of Barcelona claims a long history as one of the oldest states in Europe and Catalonia was closely associated to the throne of Aragon. Catalonia’s previleges were abolished in 1714, but there was no nationalist movement to speak of. Catalonia was then the industrial core of Spain, with inland textile mills and later textile and other industries around Barcelona. Integration within the peninsular market was favourable to Catalan industrialists. But with the Disaster of 98, industrialists increasingly felt that the Spanish state was declining into an outdated agrarian country. Catalan industrialists, largely of conservative persuasion, formed the Lliga Regionalista in 1901. The Lliga wished to economically modernize Spain under its leadership, and crush the centralist agrarian oligarchy. They used autonomy as a method of gaining leverage and obtain concessions. It was certainly not separatist, as independence was contrary to the economic interests of the industrialist elite. It was also purely opportunistic, forming temporary alliances of convenience with republicans, socialists, labour and the dynastic parties. But at its roots it was conservative, something which fueled the rise of smaller left-wing (and sometimes separatist) republican nationalist movements led by prominent left-leaning intellectuals. The Lliga’s dominant personality was the brillant Francesc Cambó, with Enric Prat de la Riba being the other main Lliga politician of the era.

The Disaster of 98 did not signal the end of the turno. Stuff went on smoothly, with the Conservatives taking over from the Liberals in 1899 and the cycle continuing, with the Liberals returning to power in 1905. It was symbolic of an elite totally blind and oblivious to reality.

Despite the defeat of 1898, the army took an increasingly aggressive place in politics post-Disaster. The officer corps were overstaffed and unreformed, and bitter at the defeats which they blamed on the incompetent corrupt civilian politicians. They proved intolerant of civilian criticism, seeing themselves as the guardian of the fatherland, national unity and social order above from the politicians.

The Cut-Cut crisis of November 1905 is particular significant in this regard. The Catalan satiric maganize Cut-Cut had published an anti-militarist cartoon, leading incensensed officers to rampage the offices of the magazine and a Catalan newspaper. The Liberal PM, Eugenio Montero Ríos was sacked by Alfonso XIII (who often sided with the military in disputes between the army and the politicians) and replaced by another Liberal, Segismundo Moret who placated the military with the 1906 Law of Jurisdictions which gave the army jurisdiction over any offence to the army, the monarchy or state. Indignated Catalans, from Carlists to Republicans and including the Lliga, formed Solidaritat Catala which won 41 out of 44 seats in Catalonia in the 1907 election. The Solidaritat alliance was opposed by Lerroux, who walked out of the PUR to form the Radicals in 1908. Solidaritat collapsed over internal divisions and the chaos of the Semana Tragica in 1909.

Given the nature of the dynastic parties, the death of their leaders in 1897 and 1903 respectively marked the end of internal stability for them. As makeshift coalitions of caciques and regional barons devoid of any real ideological anchor, the death of the leaders catalyzed the factionalization of both parties. Factions centered around one personality and with a strong base in said personality’s fief grew in number until 1923. After 1913, the Conservatives were split between the mauristas, the governing datistas and the smaller and radical right-wing ciervistas. The Liberals were split after 1912 between Álvaro de Figueroa, count of Romanones and Manuel García Prieto, marquis of Alhucemas with smaller factions appearing in later years.

The Conservatives did find a strong leader in Antonio Maura, who became the uncontested leader of the party in 1903 and took the office of Prime Minister for a second time in 1907. Maura was a regenerationist, governing by the tagline “revolución desde arriba” (revolution from the top). He sought to mobilize the electorate and break caciquismo. But his autocratic style alienated opponents, and he made no friends as he sought – unsuccessfully – to reform the electoral system (to eliminate caciquismo) and introduce corporatism in local government (again to break caciquismo). His efforts to look honest were also dashed in the 1907 elections, which his interior minister Juan de la Cierva rigged like never before. Maura fell in 1909 over the aforementioned Semana Tragica, being replaced by the Liberal Moret.

Maura grew frustrated with the turno, but the Conservatives, led by wealthy lawyer Eduardo Dato were eager to enjoy the spoils of power again, and, to Maura’s frustration, happily followed the order in 1913 when the Liberals were done for the time being. Maura and his supporters formed the maurista faction, the only dynastic party to mobilize popular support and the first modern right-wing movement in Spain though still a personalist movement.

A neutral country’s internal war: 1914-1917

Dato declared Spain’s neutrality as World War I broke out in 1914. Spain was in no position to fight a war in Europe, its army being in shambles and its economy and society being incapable of supporting the strains of a major conflict. Furthermore, Spain had no interests at stake in the Balkans and had practiced, since 1898 at least, a policy of isolationism and narrow focus on protecting the Morrocan protectorate.

Perhaps as a fateful sign of things to come, Spanish society and elites were split down the middle over the war. One the one hand, you had the Francophiles who wished for an Ally victory and on the other, the Germanophiles who wished for the Central Powers to win. The Francophiles were mostly left-wing, intellectuals, professionals and liberal democrats. The Germanophiles were mostly right-wing drawn from the previleged social groups (such as landowners, aristocrats or the military). They were close to the Prussian ideals of law, order and national unity. As war went on, the Germanophiles sought to keep Spain neutral while the Francophiles began pushing for diplomatic rupture with Germany or even military intervention.

As the belligerents necessited food, natural resources and weapons from new sources, Spain experienced a trade boom. The volume and price of exports increased, resulting in a sudden flow of gold into Spain. But the result was actually disastrous for Spanish society. The inability to import staple commodities, the unrestricted export of Spain’s domestic produce and the increasing amount of money in circulation combined to create inflation and increased social inequality. Though the caciques, speculators and profiteers amassed huge profits, the agrarian heart of Spain experienced shortages and unemployment. The social situation created worker militancy, further helped by the extraordinary 1916 pact between the reformist UGT and the anarcho-syndicalist CNT.

The middle-ranking officers in the army became increasingly restless as well in late 1916. That year, hit by the strains of the war economy and incensed by a military reform bill, they formed the Juntas Militares de Defensa – basically officer’s trade unions. The Juntas, representatives of middle-level officers, were triggered by the rising inflation, but represented military frustration with a bureaucratic army, rife with royal favouritism, and overstaffed with officers (16,000 for 80,000 soldiers). They defended their previleges but were also influenced by the military’s desire to take the reigns of a movement of national regeneration and defense of national unity.

The Francophile Liberal Count of Romanones (mostly because he did lots of business with France as a mine owner) arrived in office in December 1915 and increasingly sought to engage Spain actively in the conflict. The sinking of a ship in Spanish waters by Germany pushed him to take the next step. But in the meantime, the events in Russian had sent shockwaves through the Spanish elite, Alfonso XIII the foremost. The King dismissed him in April 1917 and replaced him with the neutralist Liberal García Prieto.

As the Juntas developed an increasingly revolutionary language with their stirring attacks on the corrupt oligarchy and political system, the worried Alfonso moved to arrest the Junteros in June 1917. But the army quickly rose in open revolt, threatened the King with a military coup and forced the García Prieto cabinet to resign less than two months after taking office. Following the turno loyally, Alfonso replaced him with Dato, who proceeded to shut down the parliament and suspend constitutional guarantees. The climate was rife for revolution. The proletarian movement was united and restless, the army was growingly revolutionary, the Catalan bourgeoisie was increasingly restless (and reinvigorated after they had forced Santiago Alba, the Castilian grain grower anti-industrialist finance minister, out of office in 1916). For the Lliga, the time was rife not for proletarian revolution but for the realignment they so wished for.

The Lliga drove the creation of an Assembly of Parliamentarians, convening in Barcelona in July 1917. The Assembly, which consisted of the regionalists, republicans and socialists, wanted a Constituent Assembly, free elections, decentralization and political reform. The mauristas, crucially, were absent and in their absence prevented the Assembly from gaining legitimacy and military acquiesence. The Dato government was able to portray the Assembly as a separatist-Red plot, all while mollifying and brown-nosing the Junteros into officially acknowledging and responding to their immediate demands. Dato also realized the contradictions within the Assembly movement: led by the conservative anti-revolutionary Cambó and the Lliga, joined by the labour movement which was angling for revolution (or atleast significant reform).

The UGT and CNT agreed to a general strike in March 1917, but the Conservative government provoked it further by inspiring employers to intransigence in their dealings with the overly cautious and reformist UGT. Dato thus forced the UGT’s hands (combined with CNT pressures on them) into calling that general strike in August 1917, the first UGT strike movement which took direct aim at the regime although the movement’s demands were extremely limited. But the movement was a flop, limited to industrial, urban or mining zones. Outside Asturias, it lasted barely a week as the bourgeoisie obviously did not fraternize with the movement while the officers, forgetting the rhetoric, crushed the movement with shocking brutality. The strike wave was crushed, but the Assembly met again in Madrid in October and reaffirmed July’s commitments to reform. Furthermore, the Junteros soon realized that the Dato cabinet had tricked them and they got word that Dato was moving towards killing them off. Understanbly, they were pissed and in October they advised Alfonso to fire Dato or risk his head. He acquiesed.

Chaos: 1917-1923

Though the democratizing movement collapsed in August 1917, the turno also collapsed with the demise of Dato. Parties became caricatures of their past selves, terribly factionalized.

At any rate, it was García Prieto who returned to power in November 1917 at the helm of an historic coalition of Liberals, mauristas, ciervistas and two Lliga regionalists. The Lliga had achieved more or less what they clamored for, that is weakening the oligarchic system and attaining power for themselves. Furthermore, it is undeniable that the proletarian movement of August 1917 had scared the Lliga away from its ephemeral opportunist alliance with the labour movement. It was much more comfortable finding accomodation with a weakened landowning oligarchy and their Liberal/Conservative representatives than with the labour movement. The García Prieto cabinet gave an illusion of some change, and the 1918 elections were remarkably open with the Dato Conservatives winning the most seats against a Liberal Party divided into five factions (though the Conservatives themselves were divided into three factions). But the 1917 events strenghtened the King, who became the ultimate arbitrer of politics; and the army, working alongside the King to form an anti-constitutional block represented in cabinet by the far-right Juan de la Cierva, the unscrupulous representative of the Junteros.

The García Prieto cabinet did not last long. In March 1918, an impressive ministerio de primates was formed with Antonio Maura at its helm. The historic cabinet of titans included all the bigwigs: Alba, Romanones, García Prieto, Dato, Maura and Cambó. Faced with Alfonso XIII’s pro-German attitude, the cabinet was unable to respond decisively to the humiliations Germany was inflicting on Spain (sinking of ships, hiring anarchist disturbers). Finally, it collapsed in November 1918 wracked by squabbles.

Class struggle increased in the wake of post-war European revolutionary movements and the Russian Revolution. The situation worsened with rising inflation, low salaries, food shortages and more trade deficits after the war boom. Led by the CNT (the UGT retreating to conservative reformism), a series of waves, disturbances and social chaos hit Spain starting in 1918. Rural unrest exploded with Andalusian peasants between 1918 and 1920 – landowners fled to the cities while workers seized power in all but name. In Catalonia, the CNT was equally reinvigorated and showed its strength with a formidable 44-day strike in 1919 at a Canadian hydroelectric concern in Barcelona.

The bourgeoisie and industrialists dropped the bourgeois reformism of the war years and moved to kill off the CNT. Spain descended into sheer violence as they hired thugs and gangs to inflict chaos and destruction on the CNT. Employers and the army held the real power and bent the governments to their will as chaos continued with arrests and murder of CNT leaders, gun fights between employers and labour and assassinations.

A crucial turning point was the 1921 disaster at Annual. In the midst of an unpopular and underfunded Moroccan campaign against local Rif tribes led by Abd-el-Krim, Spanish forces were routed at Annual in 1921 and 12,000 troops were massacred. The uproar which followed demanded that heads roll for the disaster. In reality, that meant Alfonso’s head given that he was behind the reckless adventure.

Setting up a commission on the Annual disaster was one of the things which the Liberal government of García Prieto set out to do in 1923, in addition to an ambitious project of political and social reforms. But as the Parliament continued to be a joke, all progressive schemes failed one after the other, discrediting the ultimate efforts to reform the system from within.

Prominent regenerationists including Joaquín Costa had long called for a cirujano de hierro (iron surgeon) to break the corrupt oligarchic sham liberalism of the Restoration era. The efforts to reform the system from within in 1908, 1917 and 1923 made the authoritarian solution appear as the only way out for frustrated reformists and regenerationists. Rising labour unrest and the threat to the power of the elites in the context of a general collapse of European oligarchic liberalism conspired to signal the death-knell of the liberal Restoration.

On September 13, 1923 the Captain General of Catalonia, Miguel Primo de Rivera staged a pronunciamiento and effectively seized power.

Primo’s dictatorship: cirujano de hierro (1923-1931)

A bad attempt at a Mussolini imitation: 1923-1930

As Primo seized power, he could count on the support or tolerance of the majority of the military as well as the full support of the King. Alfonso, since taking power in 1902, had showed numerous times his penchant for abuse of power and preference for an authoritarian solution. Since 1917, the army and the throne had become best buddies. Furthermore, Primo’s coup in September came just a few days before Parliament reconvened to, among other things, discuss the recommendations of the commission on Annual which could have found Alfonso responsible for the disaster. On September 13, Alfonso took his time and finally made clear that his support rested with Primo whom he quickly called upon to form a military government.

Primo could count on the active support or passivity of most of the elite. The governing civilian elites were tired and impotent. Primo’s good relations with the Catalan bourgeoisie assured him the active support of the Lliga. He also had, as a devout Catholic and Andalusian landowner, the full support of the Church, the industrialist business elite and the oligarchic landowners. Republicans and socialists opposed the coup, but could put up no resistance aside from isolated movements which were quickly crushed. The CNT was in no position to take on the military. The UGT, eternally cautious, adopted a ‘wait-and-see’ attitude which equated with passivity and tolerance for the coup.

Primo set up a military government, staffed entirely by officers. He declared martial law, dissolved Parliament, banned all parties, dissolved municipal governments, dissolved Catalan self-government and banned the use of any regional language or distinctive regionalist symbol. Though Primo admired Mussolini, he actually fell short of creating a personalist fascist regime. It was more a run-of-the-mill military dictatorship, which nonetheless stood out in Spanish history as the first military coup led not to install one party into power but rather as a rising by the non-political guardians of order, national unity and the fatherland. Primo’s rhetoric mixed ideological vagueness, anti-system/anti-political talk, populism and paternalism. The lack of a guiding philosophy or goal aside from “putting Spain back in order” and various other vague catchphrases would come to doom Primo in the future. But for now his objective was to find solutions to the urgent problems, something at which he succeeded quite well.

Primo’s biggest success came with labour relations. Although the Communist Party (PCE) and CNT were banned and their members suffered the brunt of state repression, Primo’s regime had a real desire to create a fairer society and improve living standards, perhaps as a way to quell labour unrest. Acting in an Italian-like corporatist style, Primo set up in 1926 arbitration committees to settle disputes between employers and workers. The comités paritarios did not go as far as Italy’s corporatist structures in that they did not create a single union for workers and allowed workers considerable autonomy (such as the right to strike). Crucial to the successful working of Primo’s comités paritarios was the participation of the Socialists and the UGT. The Socialists and UGT had come to the conclusion that their best hope for material gains for their base was participation in the structures of the state. The UGT, led by Francisco Largo Cabellero and the PSOE’s moderate leadership led by Julián Besteiro; both favourable to working within the structures of the regime defeated Indalecio Prieto’s faction which opposed such participation. The UGT went on the emerge as the dominant union within the comités paritarios, ahead of right-wing Catholic sindicados libres created post-war. Helped by lower commodity prices and generous public funding for education, health, social benefits and public works; social peace perdured until the end of the regime. This increase in prosperity for workers, however, only touched urban areas. Despite Primo’s propaganda coups and the sidelining of some old oligarchs, the regime did not touch the interests of the landowners and let the structures of latifundismo be.

Primo’s economic policies were heavily interventionist and protectionist. Gone were the old liberal ideas of laissez-faire, replaced instead by heavy tariff protection, state control, support for national industry, state investment in natural resources and public works and finally a large public sector. Spain had one of Spain’s largest public sectors alongside the USSR and Italy, and remained one of Europe’s most protected economies. Funding came mostly from budget surpluses, loans and credit. The state’s centralist economic policies ended up making Spain a virtual oligopoly.

Primo was vastly successful in Morocco. A Spanish retreat emboldened the Rif rebels to attack French troops, leading to a joint Franco-Spanish effort including a French attack from the south and a Spanish landing from the north. By 1926, Abd-el-Krim had been crushed and forced to unconditional surrender.

Primo originally set out to put the country back in order and then hand government back to the civilians. However, as time went on, perhaps emboldened by domestic and foreign success until 1926, Primo began making moves to perpetuate his rule.

In 1924, Primo created a new party, the Patriotic Union (UP) to mobilize support for the regime. In 1926, he called for a constituent National Consultative Assembly to be formed and draft a constitution for his regime. Both turned out to be utter failures. The major reason why Primo never managed to turn himself into an all-embracing, ruthless totalitarian leader a la Mussolini was that he remained an amateur populist and paternalist leader who lacked the totalitarianism to suppress competing interests. The UP remained an artificial (and rather small) government-fed outfit with no ideology except the vague conservative catchphrases of the 1920s. The Assembly drew up a draft which pleased nobody, and ended up being thrown out because even Primo didn’t like it.

Opposition to the regime only increased with time. The regime had been opposed by the start by the liberal intelligentsia and professional middle-classes, and most prominent liberal minds such as Miguel de Unamuno had been forced into exile and others were violently suppressed. The regime’s close alliance with the Church (marked notably by compulsory religious courses in schools) led to student protests against his regime. His centralist policies, which included supression of Catalan self-government (set up in 1914) increased peripheric nationalist sentiments, notably in Catalonia – where the Lliga’s support for Primo’s coup had discredited it at the expense of left-wing quasi-separatist movements. Most surprisingly perhaps, Primo also faced rising discontent with the army. Many factors contributed to this rising opposition to his rule within the military: personalization and perennialization of his rule, budget cuts, military reform including efforts to trim the officer corps and finally the touchy issue of promotion. Promotion had been a hot-button issue in the military since World War I or so and opposed two groups. On the one hand, the peninsular military elites (often concentrated in the artillery and engineering corps) supported strict closed-scale promotion by seniority. On the other, the africanistas (or colonial troops, largely infantry) supported promotion by war merit. Primo attempted to compromise with a special selection committee, bypassing senior generals. The Artillery Corps opposed this strongly.

Starting in 1926, there were failed coup attempts spearheaded by unholy coalitions of old dynastic politicians, republicans and even the anarcho-syndicalists. But one rebellion, although quickly crushed, received the support of the Artillery Corps which led to Primo dissolving the corps.

What doomed Primo was the 1929 economic crisis. Spain was hit particularly hard, with a sharp drop in imports and rising prices. The artificial and uncompetitive Spanish economy found it basically impossible to cope with the crisis. Given the huge public spending, the crisis also meant a huge budget deficit. The regime’s right-wing allies refused to pay in, signaling that they had lost confidence in the regime and its interventionist and corporatist policies.

In 1929, the PSOE-UGT finally broke with the regime. Indalecio Prieto’s anti-Primo faction gained the upper hand, crucially with the support of Largo Caballero who was feeling the strains of cooperation with an abandoned unpopular regime on its grassroots and the UGT.

Finally, Alfonso XIII was getting frustrated with the person whom he had happily referred to as “his Mussolini” in 1923. Unlike Victor Emmanuel, Alfonso didn’t like having the play the role of second fiddle behind the flamboyant and erratic Primo who increasingly relegated Alfonso to the role of signing his decrees. Alfonso much preferred his past role of top political arbitror, with the power to kill governments and dissolve legislatures at a whim. Furthermore, Alfonso in 1929 was well aware of the regime’s unpopularity and started worrying that his association with it would negatively affect his throne. Before it was too late, Alfonso was seeking to fire Primo and save his throne.

With the military having clearly lost confidence in him, and the King refusing to play second fiddle anymore, Primo, further wracked by diabetes and alcoholism, resigned on January 28 1930 and moved to Paris where he did, depressed, two months later.

Dictablanda: 1930-1931

It is doubtful that Alfonso could have saved his head by 1930, having already suffered extensively from seven years of association with an unpopular regime. But any chances he had of saving his spot were dashed by his own stupidity. Instead of moving quickly to civilian, constitutional democratic rule, Alfonso appointed another general, the unpopular old cripple Dámaso Berenguer as head of government. Thus began the bizarre interregnum, the dictablanda (soft dictatorship).

Alfonso’s other crucial mistake was his attempt to make as if nothing had changed since 1923 and that he could quietly go back to the old order of caciquismo. But in seven years, Primo’s regime had destroyed the strong clientelist networks of caciquismo while his interventionist economic policies had encouraged rapid modernization, industrialization and urbanization. Over a million people had migrated to larger urban centres, leading to increased urbanization. Agriculture remained dominant but did not account for a majority of the Spanish workforce. The deficient transportation network had been improved, there were more children in schools and illiteracy had declined. It was foolish on Alfonso’s part to hope that he could just call back the Liberal and Conservative parties and act as if nothing had happened. The parties themselves were empty shells, their clientelist networks destroyed and their politicians oftentimes angry at Alfonso for associating with Primo’s anti-politician rhetoric. Those who did still like Alfonso proceeded to return to their old squabbles. When Berenguer stuffed his government with Conservatives, the old Liberals were incensed, claiming that it was their turn to rig elections and get the spoils.

The dictatorship’s repression of opposition had the effect of mobilizing the unmobilized sectors: intellectuals, professionals and entrepreneurs, in favour of the republican movement. Eager for change and for a better life, these newly mobilized groups looked to the republic as the symbol of change, progress and modernity and the alternative to the discredited archaic monarchy. Some of the new republicans included Manuel Azaña but also former monarchists including Niceto Alcalá-Zamora (a former Liberal faction boss) and Miguel Maura (son of Antonio Maura). The newfound republicanism of old monarchists certainly helped further legitimize the republican movement, as moderates got increasingly attracted to the idea of a conservative republic led by moderates.

On August 17 1930, the various republican and socialist groupings signed the Pact of San Sebastián, forming a power bloc/coalition supporting the election of a constituent assembly, the proclamation of the republic and Catalan autonomy. The PSOE joined the pact in October, joining the Lerroux’s Radicals, Azaña’s Republican Action, Marcelino Domingo’s Radical-Socialists, Maura and Alcalá-Zamora’s Liberal Republican Right (DLR), Santiago Casares Quiroga’s Galician republicans and finally three Catalan republican parties including Estat Català. The Pact’s signatories proceeded to form a provisional government led by the moderates Alcalá-Zamora and Maura. But the republicans also knew that Berenguer would fall by a mere show of force, and, uniting the disparate elements of the anti-monarchist movement, organized a military insurrection for December 15, 1930.

However, an impulsive captain involved in the plot took matters to his own hands three days prior to the coup and staged an abortive insurrection in Jaca, near the French border. The authorities crushed his movement, arrested (and executed) him and forced the provisional government into jail or hiding.

The defeat of the Jaca rising was Alfonso’s last hurrah. By February, Berenguer’s Conservative-dominated cabinet was forced out after Liberals and other parties refused to take part in general elections. The King tried entrusting government to José Sánchez Guerra, the Conservative leader since 1921 and a harsh critic of the King’s role in the Primo dictatorship (which Sánchez Guerra had tried to overthrow militarily); but Sánchez Guerra’s risky gamble of attracting jailed republicans to his cabinet failed and he was forced out. Instead, Alfonso created another old-style “national concentration” cabinet including rotting discredited politicos such as Romanones, Cierva, García Prieto and Gabriel Maura. To appease all the old squabbling nobles, it was the dying cripple Admiral Aznar who became Prime Minister while Berenguer became War Minister. The national concentration option had failed in 1917, so it had no chance of success in 1931. The trial of the republicans blew up in the regime’s face, as the prisoners’ lawyers were given free reign to attack the regime and the court opened to the public (republicans). They received the minimal sentence and were soon set free.

To reorganize their old networks and test the waters, the government organized municipal elections on April 12, 1931. The republican-socialist coalition engaged in the new art of electoral campaigning, leaving the monarchists to assume it was still 1900 and that there was no need for them to campaign. The elections gave large monarchist majorities in rural areas, but the republicans and their allies carried all but 10 of Spain’s 50 provincial capitals and won huge majorities in the largest cities. Where the elections were free – that is, in the cities – the republicans won big.

It was these municipal elections which led to the collapse of the monarchy within 48 hours. The baffled, demoralized and defeatist monarchists abandoned ship en masse within 24 hours. By April 13, the cabinet decided to inform Alfonso that they could not continue lacking popular support. The army’s refusal to intervene, as in 1917 and 1923, to save his throne pushed Alfonso out of the game. On April 14, Alcalá-Zamora informed Romanones that they were giving the king until sunset to leave the country. The military informed Miguel Maura of their loyalty to the republic.

In a huge mood of euphoria, city after city proclaimed the republic on April 14. In Barcelona, colonel Francesc Macià proclaimed the Catalan Republic within an Iberian confederation.

The Republic: doomed to fail? (1931-1936)

The quick ride from euphoria to despair: 1931-1933

As other European countries were abandoning democracy in favour of authoritarianism, Spain was going the other way as it was embarking in a courageous experiment with progressive, secular, decentralized democracy never seen in Spain in the midst of the Great Depression. Greeted by waves of euphoria as a magical regime able to solve all of the country’s problems in a heartbeat, the republic faced huge odds and was perhaps doomed from its first day.

The country which the republicans wanted to turn into a modern progressive secular liberal democracy was one of Europe’s most backwards societies. Two millions of peasants were landless, while 20,000 people owned half of Spain. The Catholic Church, with one priest for 493 inhabitants, played a prominent place in society through education, business and politics. The army suffered from a huge inflation of officers. Despite the euphoria of 1931, Spain quickly polarized into two diametrically opposed rival sides representing the two conflicting national ideologies of Spain: progressive, secular and liberal on one hand; conservative, Catholic and traditionalist on the other.

Elections to the Constituent Cortes on June 28, 1931 gave a crushing majority to the republican-socialist coalition born out of the August 1930 Pact. These forces won 368 out of 470 seats, in addition to 42 Catalan nationalist republicans including the new Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC). The right was totally crushed, taking only 30 seats in the constituent assembly. The PSOE, with 115 seats emerged as the largest party while the Radicals won 90 seats. Alcalá-Zamora’s party, the DLR, won only 25 – one less than Azaña’s Republican Action.

Party Seats PSOE 115 Radicals 90 Radical-Socialists 59 ERC 29 AR 26 DLR 25 PRDF 16 FRG (Galician republicans) 14 ASR (Ortega y Gasset) 13 Other republicans 23 Other left (USC etc) 10 Republicans+Socialists and allies 420 Agrarians 15 PNV 7 Acción Nacional 5 Carlists (CT) 4 Other regionalists 13 Other right 6

The republic’s priorities were curtailing the Church’s powers, drafting a constitution, granting autonomy to Catalonia, social reform and finally the necessary agrarian reform.

The state moved quickly to severely curtail the Catholic Church’s powers. Divorce and civil marriage was legalized, religious symbols were removed from buildings and the Constitution abolished Catholicism as the state religion. But the most important move to curtail the Church’s power came with Article 26 of the constitution, which barred the Church from teaching and forced it to disclose its properties and interests, which would be taxed. The approval of Article 26 in October led Alcalá-Zamora and Miguel Maura, the government’s two moderate Catholic ministers, to quit the government.

As war minister, Azaña reformed the military as to make an apolitical organization. The old law of jurisdictions was repealed, the question of Moroccan responsibilities reopened, the number of divisions halved, officers encouraged to retire early, and promotions by war merits were frozen.

The Socialist labour and justice ministers, Francisco Largo Cabellero and Fernando de los Ríos, made the first moves towards agrarian reform. Salaries were increased, rents frozen, Primo’s arbitration committees expanded to the countryside and the eight-hour workday expanded to cover all labour. Two crucial laws aimed at the countryside and the oligarchs were passed: the Law of Municipal Boundaries barred owners from employing outside labour until all those in the municipality had jobs and the Law of Obligatory Cultivation required owners to use all land for arable purposes.

The Constitution, approved in December 1931, was a modern progressive document which defined Spain as a nation of workers of all classes and as an integral republic compatible with regional and local autonomy. The republic was a parliamentary regime, led by a unicameral legislature. The legislature was to be elected following a complex electoral law, part proportional and part majoritary – single-seat constituencies were replaced by multi-member provincial (or, for larger cities, municipal) constituencies, with roughly 80% of seats awarded to the winning list and 20% to the runners-up. The system allowed for more stability while allowing for the representation of minority parties, and encouraged parties to form coalitions. The head of state was a President elected by the legislature and an elected commission to a six-year term. The divisions caused by Alcalá-Zamora’s resignation in October were patched up when Alcalá-Zamora was elected the republic’s first President.

The most controversial feature of the constitution was its stridently anti-clerical aspect (Article 26 being the best example). Going beyond a simple separation of Church and state, even moderate onlookers opined that the constitution targetted the Church and devout Catholics. From the point of the view of the liberal left republican drafters of this constitution, such a bellicuous attitude towards the Church and Catholicism is hardly surprising. The Church had been a reactionary bulwark under the Alfonsine monarchy which had kept Spain as a backwards nation. Furthermore, a good part of the Church’s hierarchy was hell-bent on destroying the republic from the outset, unable to stomach democracy and progress. For the republicans, it was primordial that Spain broke off all links with the Church, because it was the only way to build a progressive Spain. But they apparently forgot that in April 1931, the republic had been supported by vast cohorts of moderate to conservative Catholics. The hostile approach to the issue alienated those willing to compromise and strenghtened the hand of reactionaries within the Church’s hierarchy. Church burnings throughout Spain in 1931, during which the republicans sat on their hands, did nothing to appease Catholics and the Church.

The republic in the crucial years between 1931 and 1933 was opposed from virtually every angle imaginable. The most resistance to the new regime was found on the right, where the old elites and dominant economic classes feared for their status within the new society if the Socialist-led reformist agenda was implemented.

The 1931 elections had left the right decimated. Only 30 or so right-wingers were returned in the elections to the Constituent Cortes, most of them independent “agrarians”. What could be termed the “old right” no longer existed – the dynastic parties were, of course, dead and their members all over the place. The “new right” which was to emerge was to be drastically different from the “old right” movements led by notables and which were not close to constituting true political movements. The new right was heavily influenced by the emergence of fascism and was nationalist, authoritarian, anti-democratic and in many cases stridently clerical.

The right was divided into two groups. On the far-right, the catastrofistas were entirely commited to the destruction of the regime by any means possible, violence included. The catastrofistas included the Carlists, who developed a vicious paramilitary known as the Requeté; the wealthy and influential Alfonsine monarchists and a new fascist grouping known as the Falange, founded in 1933 by Miguel Primo de Rivera’s son José Antonio. The other right-wingers were the moderate accidentalistas who adopted a legalist attitude and whose main preoccupation was not the type of government (deemed an ‘accident’) but rather the nature of the government and the way it was run. Whether or not the accidentalistas were actually republicans is up for debate. They may have been pragmatists who knew it impossible to destroy the regime so early, instead aiming to win control of the regime and destroy it from within.

The right which emerged in Spain between 1931 and 1933 represented a real popular movement, backed not only by the old elites but also by the devoutly Catholic farmers of Castile and Navarre. In the formation of such a mass party, influential wealthy Catholics played a key role. The ACNP, an organization of right-wing media owners whose control of a large part of the media allowed for the spreading of the rhetoric which would inflamme the conservative masses. The ACNP’s media depicted the republic as Godless, anti-Spanish, satanical and evil. The ACNP was funded by business and employers, and most notably by the rural oligarchy. The rural oligarchy, dominant even during Primo’s regime, had the most to loose from a reformist agenda which could totally destroy the balance of power in rural Spain in favour of the proletariat. The new laws forced the landowners to pay their labourers more while the labourers worked fewer hours. The mixed-juries were dominated by Socialists and bound to favour labour. It was primarily in the Spanish countryside that the two visions of Spain collided: traditionalist clerical versus secular progressive and egalitarian.

Two movements clashed in the countryside. On the one hand, the UGT changed significantly as hundreds of landless labourer joined the National Federation of Landworkers (FNTT), affiliated to the UGT. The UGT, represented in government by Largo Caballero, the Socialist labour minister, became a mass movement with a plurality of its members being landless workers. In doing so, it displaced the CNT as the representative of the rural proletariat. On the other stood the National Catholic Agrarian Confederation (CNCA), a right-wing movemented representing smallholders and led by José María Gil Robles. The CNCA was in effect controlled by landowners and the conservative Church hiearchy, but it could successfully mobilize thousands of poor Castilian farmers, proud of their status as landowners and fearful of attempts to ‘proletarize’ them. The CNCA’s cohorts of poor Catholic farmers were the backbone and base of the new right.

The republic also had enemies on its left. The CNT’s moderates, led by Angel Pestaña, were prepared to work with the republic but they found their attempts opposed by doctrinaire anarchists within the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation, a radical 1927 split from the CNT) who were implacably hostile towards the new regime. The anarchists preached violence and rebellion in preparation for the final revolution. Those violent tactics forced the government into arresting a lot of them, but that did not prevent the FAI from winning control of the CNT by late 1931.

The republic, more specifically the Azaña cabinet in office since October 1931, was finally opposed from within the San Sebastián coalition itself. In the 1931 elections, Lerroux’s Radicals had emerged as the second republican force and largest non-Marxist party. But by 1931, Lerroux, already disliked by the Socialists who saw him as a demagogic crook, projected an image of himself as a moderate pragmatist and guarantor of a conservative republic. Lerroux’s ultimate goal was, of course, power, which he felt entitled to given his status as the boss of the largest non-Marxist republican party. In December 1931, when Azaña made it clear he would stay around for a while, Lerroux and the Radicals left the government.

In Catalonia, hours before the republic had been proclaimed in Madrid on April 14, Catalan republicans under Francesc Macià proclaimed the Catalan Republic within an Iberian federation. Macià and his lieutenant Lluis Companys ultimately backed down and agreed to take it easy. The Catalan government drafted a statute of autonomy which recreated the ancient Catalan government or Generalitat and a Catalan Parliament. The statute was approved in a referendum in Catalonia in August 1931 and approved by the Cortes in Madrid in September 1932. In November 1932, Macià’s coalition led by the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) won the elections to Catalonia’s new parliament by a landslide (67 seats to 18, including 17 for the Lliga).

Throughout 1931 and 1932 there were attempts in both Euskadi and Navarre to draft a common statute of autonomy for the two provinces. The conservative PNV and the Carlists were the driving force in the drafting of the Statute of Estella in June 1931 (before the Constitution of the republic had been approved). The Estella Statute, which was confederal in nature and covered both the three Basque provinces and Navarre, was rejected by the Cortes in September as anticonstitutional because it had devolved responsibility over church-state relations to the Basque government instead of Madrid as in the December 1931 Constitution. There was another attempt, within the framework of the constitution this time, in the summer of 1932, but in June 1932 it was ultimately delayed when Navarre’s municipalities voted against the proposed statute, far more centralist and far less conservative.

Macià found himself helped in his fight to have his statute approved by the Cortes by an unlikely ally. In August 1932, the conservative general Sanjurjo rebelled in Seville to counter the ‘revolutionary’ character of the republic. The coup was put down and Sanjurjo later exiled to Portugal. The coup had the effect of breaking the accidentalista’s attempt to filibuster the statute and an agrarian reform law. Both were approved in September.

The accidentalistas blamed the catastrofistas’s recklessness for breaking their success in stalling the legislative process for a month. In February 1933, the accidentalistas led by deputy and CNCA secretary José María Gil Robles founded a new right-wing mass party: the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Rights (CEDA). The CEDA’s slogan was the defense of religion (against the anti-clerical republic), fatherland (against the concession of autonomy to regions, seen as breaking up Spain), law, order (against the perceived lawlessness, often caused by FAI) and property (against attempts at agarian reform). The CEDA’s ultimate goal is once again up for debate, but it seems clear that it wished to create an authoritarian, corporatist, Catholic Spain mimicking Hitler and Mussolini. The Alfonsine catastrofistas ultimately set up Renovación Española (RE), led by ex-minister José Calvo Sotelo. CEDA collaborated closely with both Calvo Sotelo’s party and the so-called “agrarians”.

The agrarian reform passed in 1932 was a flawed one, filled with vague clauses and clearly not a thorough reform. It didn’t go far enough for landless peasants, yet went (much) too far for landowners. Reform then moved very slowly, as the government showed itself incapable and in some cases unwilling to apply the law. Violent altercations between peasants and authorities increased in 1932, culmininating in a local rebellion in Andalusia led by the FAI in January 1933. It was crushed, but in the remote village of Casas Viejas, the rebels heldout. In the end, they were burnt out and executed by authorities. 19 peasants and one police officer died, sparking a wave of protest and disillusion. The government failed to recover from Casas Viejas.

The incident at Casas Viejas exarcerbated tensions within the PSOE. The old leadership was still led by Julián Besteiro, the moderate who believed in slow and gradual progress towards socialism. Besteiro had opposed the PSOE’s participation in government in 1931, believing that Socialists had no place in the achievement and construction of the bourgeois’ task. He had been outvoted on that front in 1931 by the two other wings, the one led by Indalecio Prieto and the trade-unionist wing led by Francisco Largo Cabellero. Prieto’s followers believed in the consolidation of the republic and the construction of a new progressive order. Largo Caballero supported the republic and was enthusiastic about the prospect of joining government. He knew that he could use the labour ministry and the state machinery to implement social legislation and to favour the UGT over the CNT. Both wings saw the Socialists as a crucial block in the consolidation of the republic, and they cooperated in ousting Besteiro from the leadership in 1932 in favour of Largo Caballero. But as times got tougher and the government sunk in direr straits, the solidarity between both wings foundered. Prieto still supported Socialist participation in government, but Largo Caballero, ear to the ground, did not. He was aware of widespread rural anger and disillusion, and the associated risk of losing ground to the CNT-FAI. In addition, the UGT-FNTT was radicalizing. Disillusionment was also spreading within the party: even if legislation was approved, there was little machinery to enforce it and the landowners and other elites were ignoring the decrees. This disillusion within the PSOE’s rank-and-file, combined with growing ideological polarization with a quasi-fascist CEDA encouraged a radicalization of the PSOE.

Simultaneously, Lerroux was aggressively trying to push the Socialists out of government and win power for himself. Galvanized by a right-wing victory in municipal by-elections of sorts in April 1933, Lerroux’s plans gained strength when one of the smaller governing party, Marcelino Domingo’s Radical-Socialists split over continuing the alliance with the PSOE. In the summer of 1933, Azaña’s cabinet only narrowly survived a Radical motion of no confidence. Alcalá-Zamora used that as an excuse to dismiss his government and appoint a Lerroux-led Radical government. Lacking a majority, Lerroux’s government lasted less than a month before it was brought down. Alcalá-Zamora called for general elections on November 19.

The Spanish Trojan Horse: 1933-1936

Now led by the Caballeristas, the PSOE decided to fight the general elections alone in most provinces. On the other hand, the right led by CEDA fought united and led an aggressive well-funded campaign for an election which they depicted as a choice between God/Catholicism and communism, and invoked that no good Catholic could vote for the left. In the first elections where women could vote, CEDA and its allied fronts warned women that communism (the left) would destroy their families, churches and villages. Allied with the Radicals in a number of provinces, CEDA emerged as the largest party with 115 seats (out of 473). Their closest allies won an additional 43 (including 30 agrarians), while 39 monarchists were elected including 20 Carlists and 14 from Calvo Sotelo’s RE. In the centre, Lerroux’s Radicals once again emerged as the second largest force with 102 seats to which could be added a smattering of seats for smaller conservative republican parties including Miguel Maura’s PRC and Alcalá-Zamora’s PRP. On the left, the ‘bourgeois republican’ parties were totally crushed returning only 13 members (only 5 for Azaña’s AR). The PSOE, while the second largest party in terms of votes with 21.7% of the vote, was destroyed by its strategy of fighting alone and won only 59 seats.

Party Seats CEDA 115 Agrarians 30 Carlists (CTC) 20 RE 14 Falange 1 Other right 18 Right 198 Radicals 102 Lliga 24 PRC (Maura) 17 PNV 11 PRLD (Melquíades Alvarez) 9 Other centre-right (PRP etc) 12 Centre-Right 175 PSOE 59 ERC 17 PRG (Galician republicans) 6 AR 5 Other republicans 9 Other left (USC, PCE) 4

Gil Robles attempted to form government, but the right lacked a majority on its own and Alcalá-Zamora would not entrust the formation of a government to him. However, Lerroux and the other centrist republicans were also unable to form a government on their own. Finally, in December, Lerroux was named Prime Minister and confirmed to that office with CEDA’s support, though CEDA did not participate in the cabinet.

While the Radicals would win power and the spoils of office, CEDA forced the government to introduce legislation it put forward. That meant dismantling most of the reforms, which further radicalized the left (and working-class) while polarization reached a peak in the context of a worsening economy during the Depression. The CEDA was the real power behind the series of short-lived Radical governments, held to ransom by CEDA who dropped them whenever the government did something which displeased them. For example, in March 1934, CEDA forced Lerroux to remove the moderate Interior Minister, Diego Martínez Barrio, and replace him with a right-wing Radical. A month later Lerroux’s government resigned when Gil Robles forced him to pass an amnesty covering the 1932 conspirators. Gil Robles’ goal was to foster enough instability to create a perfect storm where he would finally take over and CEDA would create an authoritarian corportatist regime.

The CEDA’s influence over government meant that in the countryside, the balance of power was restored in favour of the oligarchs. Salaries were cut, contracts broken, expropriated land returned, and the PSOE chased out of mixed-juries. When the Law of Municipal Boundaries was repealed in May 1934, the FNTT launched a general strike which was, however, not supported by the Caballerista-led UGT which showed how empty their revolutionary rhetoric had always been. In contrast, the government ruthlessly and violently put down the strike and arrested hundreds of Socialists activitists including four deputies.

In Catalonia, the Generalitat led by Lluis Companys (following Macià’s death in late 1933) introduced a law giving tenant wine-growers the right to buy the land they had cultivated after 18 years. The landowners, led by the Lliga, sued the Catalan government over the anticonstitutionality of the law, and Companys was compelled to withdrew it. But he reintroduced it a few months later.

In September 1934, Gil Robles and CEDA organized a mass rally in Asturias (at the spot where the Medieval reconquista had begun). In a rally evoking parallels with Nazi rallies, Gil Robles, hailed as the jefe turned even more belligerent. He threatened a new reconquest against the “Red atheist separatists”. In late September, Gil Robles withdrew support from the government and demanded ministerial participation. On October 4, Lerroux finally formed a government in which CEDA held three ministries.

Prior to October 4, the Socialists had threatened an armed rebellion if CEDA acceeded to cabinet. Parallels were drawn with Germany, Italy and Austria where dictatorial right-wing or fascist regimes had been installed even though its protagonists had accepted only a minority of cabinet positions at the outset. Perhaps the Austrian example, where Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, leader of a Christian-Social Party ideologically close to CEDA had staged a coup in 1933 and established a dictatorship, invoked the most fear for the left.

The unprepared Socialists found themselves leading an armed rebellion in October 1934, which, following the dismal pattern of such affairs in Spain, failed epically. The government moved in quickly and rounded up prominent left-wing leaders and shoved them into jails, while in Barcelona the military quickly gained the upper hand over the left-wing Generalitat which had proclaimed a Catalan Republic. The rebellion only succeeded in Asturias, where a left-wing front of miners armed with dynamite held out against the state. As the state of war was proclaimed, power passed into the hands of the military. Masterminded by General Francisco Franco, adviser to the war minister, and led by Colonel Juan Yaguë, the government sent in African troops and Moorish mercenaries. The revolt was put down, but it was a bloodbath. All kinds of savage atrocities were committed and torture used freely. Over 1300 people died in the events of October 1934, most of them in Asturias.

CEDA’s entry into government in October 1934 went hand-in-hand with the acceleration of the reactionary politics of reprisal inaugurated in 1933. In rural Spain, wages were cut, peasants evicted, mixed-juries overthrown and caciques returned to positions of prominence alongside the Church. In Catalonia, autonomy was suspended. Gil Robles and CEDA proved increasingly demanding on the government, all with the goal of increasing his power over Lerroux’s cabinets. In May 1935, CEDA emerged as the largest party in the shuffled Lerroux cabinet, with five ministries including the War Ministry given to Gil Robles. As War Minister, Robles used his power to purge the army of liberals and replace them with hard-line conservatives and africanistas while leading conservative officers such as Franco, Goded and Mola received juicy promotions.

By the summer of 1935, with the right clearly in control of government, it seemed as if Gil Robles’ gamble had paid off. The left was decimated with its prominent leaders in jail, the balance of power had shifted back towards the elites and the Church, and Gil Robles’ power was growing by the day. All came undone in the fall of 1935 with the surfacing of a series of scandals directly involving prominent Radicals and Lerroux himself. The largest scandal was the straperlo affair, involving collusion of prominent Radicals and Lerroux’s nephew with a gang of criminal international gamblers.

Gil Robles used the scandals as an excuse to topple the government in December. He compelled Alcalá-Zamora to appoint him Prime Minister, but Alcalá preferred to dissolve parliament and call on a political ally of his to organize elections for February 16, 1936.

The Popular Front: 1936

Polarization was at its peak in 1936, with the centre and Radicals lying in ruins following the scandals of the fall. Two blocks faced off in February 1936. On the right, CEDA and its allies formed a National Bloc. On the left, Manuel Azaña, his star power boosted by his months in prison (he was released, along with others including Largo Caballero for lack of evidence), dedicated himself to re-creating the winning coalition of 1931. Azaña’s program included a return to the legislation of 1931 and an amnesty for the rebels of October 1934. Quickly thereafter, he invited the divided PSOE to join him.

Indalecio Prieto still enthusiastically favoured participation in such an affair, but Largo Caballero remained deeply distrustful and disillusioned with the republic and resisted any attempt to integrate the party in a left-wing coalition. Ironically, Largo Caballero was pushed towards moderating his opposition by the small PCE. In 1935, the Comintern in Moscow had decreed a strategy of alliances with progressive bourgeois parties to halt the authoritarian fascist tide. The PCE, now a passionate defender of an alliance with Azaña and his progressive bourgeois allies, compelled Largo Caballero to give way. He finally did, though on condition of no ministerial responsibility for Socialists.

The Frente Popular (Popular Front) was forged in early January 1936 by a vast coalition of parties including the PCE, the PSOE, small liberal bourgeois parties and new small left-wing groups including Angel Pestaña’s Syndicalist Party and the anti-Stalinist Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM).

The election was extremely narrow. The Popular Front won 47% of the vote against 46.5% for the parties of the right. The gap between both blocs was roughly 75,000 votes. Centrist parties won a pitiful 3.5%. But the electoral system translated a close affair into a landslide victory for the left in terms of seats. The left won 265 seats to the right’s 185 seats. The Socialists took 99 seats, a few more than the 87 seats won by Manuel Azaña’s Republican Left (IR) – a new party including the old AR, Casares Quiroga’s Galician ORGA and Marcelino Domingo’s left-wing faction of the Radical-Socialists. Diego Martínez Barrio’s Republican Union (UR) won 37 seats. On the right, CEDA won 88 seats, the Agrarians took 10 seats and Calvo Sotelo’s monarchists won 12 seats. The Radicals won just five seats (most of them in coalition with CEDA), and Lerroux himself was defeated. After electoral results were invalidated in two provinces, new elections in May 1936 increased the left’s majority to 286 against 166 for the right.

Party Seats (final) PSOE 99 IR 87 UR 37 ERC 21 PCE 17 FP Regionalists 13 Other left (POUM, USC etc) 8 Other republicans 4 Frente Popular 286 CEDA 88 BN-RE 12 Lliga 12 Agrarians 10 Carlists (CTC) 9 Other right 10 Right* 141 PCNR (Centre) 17 PNV 9 PRP 6 Radicals 5 Others 9

*many centrists and Radicals elected with the right

Gil Robles attempted to get Franco and other generals to stage a coup, and when that failed he desperately attempted to have the election results invalidated.

Manuel Azaña formed an all-republican administration in February 1936 with UR and IR ministers, while the Socialists remained on the sidelines. His administration attempted to set the agenda, but instead a series of strikes by frustrated workers demanding better wages and conditions set the agenda in his place. In the countryside, landless peasants and the FNTT took the initiative and began seizing estates.

On the right, CEDA was shattered by the defeat and its legalism outdated. Members of CEDA’s youth wing, the JAP, flooded the ranks of Primo de Rivera’s fascist Falange while the monarchist RE took the political leadership of the right away from Gil Robles and CEDA. Planning for a potential coup began in March. The plotters were bankrolled by powerful right-wing groups, and provided with a base throughout Spain by collaboration with the right-wing Spanish Military Union (UME) association.

Simultaneously, politicial violence escalated. Falangist and Carlist gangs attacked left-wingers, who retaliated by killing right-wingers; all creating a dangerous and slippery climate of anarchy and terror. The right seized on the climate of anarchy and terror to spin the situation into attacks on the left-wing republic’s anarchy and lawlessness.

In April, the left impeached President Alcalá-Zamora for abusing his power by dissolving the parliament twice within his term. The old man, in 1933 and 1935, had managed to antagonize both the right and left. In late April, Azaña was elected President. The original plan had been to promote Indalecio Prieto to the office of Prime Minister, but Largo Caballero blocked that move. Largo played up his revolutionary rhetoric, which hardly went beyond words, and in doing so he crippled the republic by preventing the formation of a strong government. Instead, the old and weak Santiago Casares Quiroga was named Prime Minister in May 1936. The government attempted to break the impetus for a coup by moving leading conservative generals, including Franco, Goded and Mola to distant outposts. But in doing so, it only allowed those generals to expand their network. Most significantly, General Mola, who from his outpost in the Carlist stronghold of Navarre emerged as the domestic leader of the plot, organized a powerful quasi-state with the help of the Carlists and their Requeté militia.

On July 12, a prominent left-wing officer of the republican Assault Guards was assassinated by right-wingers. A few hours later, a left-wing hit squad captured and killed Calvo Sotelo. The killing of Calvo Sotelo was the trigger to the coup. On the evening of July 17, 1936 the army revolted in Morocco.

The inevitability of Civil War?

Was the Spanish Civil War inevitable? Was the republic doomed to failure before it even started? Despite the euphoria which greeted the proclamation of the republic in April 1931, the reality was that a clash between the two opposing visions of Spanish society were bound to clash. Since 1812, Spain had become an increasingly fragmented, polarized and backwards society marked by a deep-seated opposition between two visions which was further accentuated by the plethora of problems faced by Spain.

Spain’s societal structure had evolved to create such violent antagonisms and contradictions.

Firstly, Spain’s governing elites had failed – unlike in France – to create a Spanish nation-state; a common vision or project of Spain with a founding history, myth or event to unify it (such as the Revolution in France). What emerged in its stead was a Spanish nationalism which was in reality Castilian nationalism, eternally confusing Castile with the whole of Spain. Efforts at centralization by Madrid ever since 1700 were driven far more by material concerns than by ideological objectives, and the result was a state marked by a total lack of national unity. In addition, often times, Madrid’s attitude towards regional differences and centralization efforts were governed by the government’s relations with those regions. Those regions which chose correctly in conflicts were rewarded with goodies such as special accommodations or laws. Those regions which didn’t choose correctly had those laws taken away from them though sooner or later they patched differences up and got some special advantages themselves.

Incomplete centralization since 1492, a patchwork of laws up until the late 1800s and unequal economic development between the regions of Spain were the causes of such a lack of national unity and the causes of the birth of peripheric nationalism. These nationalist movements opposed centralization from the centre and fought to preserve the interests and laws of their own turf. National unity and the constitution of a Spanish nation-state was impossible. Spain was a patchwork of regions, different in political attitude and different in socio-economic terms. Peripheric nationalisms sought to uphold those differences, and gathered strength to become a powerful ‘frustrators’ of any change in power relations between Madrid and the regions.

Secondly, Spain lacked a democratic tradition and its dominant institutions – the Church and army – were not democratic institutions. Spain had a long history of authoritarianism of various sorts, with little history of political mobilization. Up until 1875, governments were taken out by military coups, not elections. From 1875 to 1923, governments alternated in power based on an archaic illiberal system of sharing the spoils. There were elections, they were not entirely fraudulent affairs, but there could be no real political mobilization. It was in reality an undemocratic system propped up by the triple alliance of conservative undemocratic institutions: crown, Church and military. The crown under Alfonso XIII was deeply involved in political intrigues and short-circuited democracy constantly. The Church’s position of choice within Spanish society was threatened by democracy, and thus continued to closely support the backwards social order. The military had a bloated officers corp and couldn’t keep its head out of politics, because it increasingly saw itself as the non-partisan guardians of national unity against incompetent, corrupt civilian politicians which they had grown to hate since 1898.

When the Republic emerged in 1931, it attempted to transform Spain from a quasi-Medieval state into a modern, progressive liberal state of the twentieth century. The strong position of the Church and military within Spain was, however, not conducive to the creation of such a society. The Church’s close alliance with the crown and then Primo’s regime had turned it into a vicious, tyrannical bulwark of reaction in the eyes of the republicans. Thus you had deep-seated, ultramontane Catholicism against extreme anti-clericalism.

In the bulk of Spain’s countryside, social relations were quasi-feudal and led to vicious opposition between two uncompromising actors. Wealthy, oligarchic landowners in the south were opposed by dirt poor landless peasants and labourers; creating a climate of violent class hostility channelized, for most of the early twentieth century, by the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. Industrial development, furthermore, remained unequal. Catalonia, Euskadi, Madrid and Asturias emerged as the main and almost the only industrial poles in the country, while the rest of Spain (the south, Castile, Galicia and Navarre in particular) remained agrarian societies. Deficient transportation links had prevented industrial growth and the spread of wealth throughout Spain, and had also served to discourage mixing of the population or significant, large-scale modern urbanization.

Spanish society and the Spanish state were built in such a way that rendered the constitution of two diametrically opposed blocs inevitable. They represented two totally different visions of society, two different national projects. On one hand, there was the traditional, conservative, Catholic view of Spain. That vision viewed the Church as a fundamental actor within a country defined by its Catholic root