Prime Minister
(1933–1934)
In his memoirs, the CEDA leader José María Gil-Robles repeatedly stressed his ideological differences with Lerroux. ‘There was a gulf’, he wrote, ‘between our ideas, [and] his friends and [republican] background were distasteful to me. Given his political position, my contact with him was strictly limited, determined only by the supreme interests of the nation’. Yet he did not hesitate to praise the Radical leader for his willingness to work with the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-Wing Groups (CEDA) in parliament and then in government, noting that ‘I always thought that Alejandro Lerroux was greater than his party . . . at all times when we sat opposite each other examining the problems of Spain, I could see his clarity of judgement, human feeling, loyalty to the task at hand, a noble heart and his deep patriotism’.1 The agreement between both of them symbolised an elitist pact that would later generate close synergies between very distinct political movements.
It is certainly true that this entente would have been unthinkable without the common experience of opposition to the republican-socialist coalition. Common antipathy towards Azaña’s policies reduced the political distance between a once leftist republican party and a Catholic movement more right wing than the dynastic parties that Lerroux had faced before 1923. Nevertheless, the CEDA was no reinvention of the old Catholic leagues or even the short-lived Christian right Social Popular Party of 1922–24. Its leaders and activists came from the liberal-conservative and agrarian organisations that formed the constitutional right under the monarchy. The closer identification of Catholics with the centre-right paralleled the Radicals’ overtures to those on the former monarchist left in the hope of occupying the political space held by the Liberal Party until 1917.
Even so, a rapprochement between the Radicals and the CEDA only took place in November 1933. Until then, Lerroux saw the latter as a rival for the conservative vote, and when he became prime minister that September, he faced opposition from both the left and the right. Thus at the same time as dismantling socialist patronage networks within the labour, public works and education ministries, he faced a confident CEDA determined to diminish the huge pro-republican majority produced in the previous general election of June 1931. Thanks to the polarisation of the two previous years, Lerroux’s hope that the Radicals would constitute the main alternative to the left looked unlikely to be realised.
This was confirmed on the night of 19 November 1933 when the first round of the elections showed the extent of the collapse in the left republican vote. Lerroux reacted skilfully to break the electoral unity of his opponents on his right, separating the CEDA and the agrarians of Martínez de Velasco from those monarchists determined to end the new regime. By accepting that constitutional reform was necessary, the Radical leader hoped to enlist the former in his quest to consolidate the moderate Republic. That entailed jettisoning his earlier ideas of all-republican unity. Electoral coalitions could no longer provide the basis of government; any new administration, Lerroux now accepted, had to include former monarchists. This was only possible if Lerroux pushed his party further to the right and repudiated the idea of equidistance between his rivals on either side of the political spectrum. To prevent rightists from taking those millions of Spanish voters disillusioned with the Republic for their cause, the Radicals needed to demonstrate that conservative government was possible within the existing political system. This would mean discounting the intense hostility of a left that asserted proprietorial claims over the Republic. However, Lerroux would never have imagined that scarcely a year later this antagonism would lead to a rebellion.
The Scheming President
The Radicals did not have to wait until October 1934 to realise that they had nothing to gain by turning left. Alcalá-Zamora wanted the republicans and the socialists to agree about the need to hold fresh elections in order to avoid a unilateral – and therefore controversial – presidential dissolution of parliament. He therefore instructed Lerroux to form a government that included left republicans in the hope that it could secure a majority in the Cortes. The Radical leader’s tenure of office thus began awkwardly, as he accepted the president’s unconstitutional inference in the formation of his new administration. Lerroux believed that Alcalá-Zamora was desperate to justify any future election by pointing to the failure of parliament to produce a majoritarian government. The initial refusal of leftist republicans to work with the Radicals supports this interpretation. Alcalá-Zamora told Azaña that if he did not change his attitude, his one-time ally would organise fresh elections. The former prime minister then relented, and Lerroux took office on the basis that any change of mind by his reluctant new partners would lead to a dissolution. The Radical leader held all the cards: Azaña did not want to go to the country, while Alcalá-Zamora needed to ensure that any post- election government would not challenge the original decision to go to the polls.2
Following the tradition begun during the constitutional monarchy, Lerroux personally selected as ministers those left republicans who were closest to the Radicals. ‘I looked for the most moderate’, he later recalled, as ‘I could not form a [politically] homogeneous Cabinet’. He deliberately excluded Azaña and Domingo. This Radical-led coalition was presented to the nation on 12 September, but few thought that it had a long shelf life. Azaña quickly warned that he would not support any reversal of his policies and stressed that his party opposed any measures to conciliate the right. Domingo went further and preferred to split his own party rather than vote with the government. Keen to maintain his political creditability, Lerroux announced his new government’s programme to the Cortes on 2 October. He made few concessions to the left. The prime minister declared that he would facilitate the Basque Statute and relax secularisation measures. He promised to revive the economy by changing agrarian reform to promote smallholdings and weakening trade union collectives, as well as repealing the Municipal Boundaries Law, politically neutralising the labour arbitration boards and balancing the budget. Not surprisingly, he pledged to restore public order, but made clear his commitment to a more inclusive Republic by offering amnesty to those imprisoned or deported by the Azaña government (namely anarchists and monarchists), as well as reversing the dismissals of army officers and state employees deemed anti-republican or implicated in the failed coup of August 1932.3
While Lerroux knew that the PSOE would react with hostility, he was indignant that at the first opportunity his left republican allies supported a vote of no confidence proposed by the socialist leader Prieto. This ‘parliamentary execution’ had two objectives: warn Alcalá-Zamora that he should not use his constitutional powers against the leftist majority, and prevent Lerroux from holding an election. Both Prieto and Azaña believed that such a motion would force the president to dismiss Lerroux under Article 75 of the Constitution and nominate a different successor. This was a foolish interpretation. For one thing, the Radical leader had already announced his resignation before the vote was taken, and when Lerroux was in the Presidential Palace, the speaker of the Cortes, Julián Besteiro, declared that the parliamentary session had been suspended. More importantly, the no confidence motion did not comply with constitutional procedure. It only served to worsen relations between Azaña and Lerroux still further. ‘You can trick me into taking [political office] once, twice, even three times’, he noted, ‘but I will never do it being treated like an idiot’. Time did not mellow his rage, writing in his memoirs that he had never previously suffered such ‘cynical disloyalty [and] shameless betrayal’.4
Alcalá-Zamora did not attach much significance to the vote and decided to dissolve the Cortes. He was aided by the socialists’ declaration that they had been ‘expelled from Power’ by the president and ‘betrayed’ by those left republican allies who had joined the Lerroux government. To put it another way, since the PSOE were resolved not to reconstitute the former governing coalition, a dissolution by a Radical administration appeared inevitable, especially as it was likely that Lerroux was the only major republican figure who could successfully head off the electoral challenge from the right.5 Yet the Radical leader never received the call to lead another government. Instead, Alcalá-Zamora began an extensive round of consultations. Before 1923, it was common for the monarch to seek guidance among party leaders, former prime ministers and speakers of the Cortes. However, from June 1933, the president adopted the questionable habit of including non-party worthies in discussions. These talks were in reality a charade to provide legitimacy for a decision that he had made beforehand: Lerroux could not be prime minister.
Alcalá-Zamora first turned to Besteiro to lead an all-party government, but the socialist who had always spoken against the PSOE taking ministerial office, turned him down. He then offered the job to three ‘neutral’ figures: Manuel Pedregal, Gregorio Marañón and Felipe Sánchez-Román. The president wanted them to lead broadly based coalitions of socialists, left republicans and Radicals that would – crucially – accept the rationale for elections. They failed. To the growing anger of the Radical leader, Alcalá-Zamora then turned to another independent, the jurist Adolfo González-Posada. On the president’s request, he completely ignored the Constitutional Court to declare that the motion of no confidence signified that Lerroux’s ministers, but not the outgoing prime minister himself, could be asked to form a new government. This was a veto that an increasingly nervous Alcalá-Zamora hoped would pacify the left.
On the third day of consultations, Lerroux was dealt a bitter blow from an unexpected quarter. The president offered the premiership to his deputy, Martínez Barrio. His boss initially did not object, assuming that the socialists and the left republicans would dismiss the idea. But late that night, a flustered Martínez Barrio arrived at Lerroux’s home with Azaña and Domingo to seek permission to form a government that included socialists as well as left republicans. The Radical leader reluctantly consented, conscious that Alcalá-Zamora was determined to exclude him from high office. This decision stunned his supporters and elated his opponents. In the end, the PSOE only agreed not to vote against Martínez Barrio, but a relieved president confirmed the creation of a Radical-left republican coalition. Lerroux did not hide his frustration with Alcalá-Zamora, although he consoled himself with the thought that his right-hand man now occupied the premiership. His faith was rewarded as Martínez Barrio obtained from the president the cherished dissolution of parliament, disabusing Azaña and Domingo of the notion that the constituent assembly would continue. Spain finally went to the polls on 19 November 1933.6
Although Lerroux finally got want he wanted, the undignified manner in which his deputy took office created a baneful precedent for the future. After Alcalá-Zamora’s failed attempt to persuade Besteiro to take premiership, he acted without reference to political parties, giving the impression that the Constitution had granted him free rein in shaping Spanish political life to his own whims. Not only did the president want to impose a candidate of his choice as prime minister, but he violated the Constitution by insisting that his nominees had to form a particular kind of coalition government. The fierce rivalry between the parties allowed Alcalá-Zamora to take advantage of his ill-defined powers and create an administration of his choosing. The president always believed that since he was responsible for the exercise of his prerogatives, he had the right to use them in any way he saw fit; his power to give and withdraw confidence to ministers was used as a mechanism to make or break governments.
The appointment of Martínez Barrio also showed that Alcalá-Zamora did not respect the established lines of authority within parties. The self-sacrifice of Lerroux in September 1933 destroyed the elementary principle that party leaders formed governments. By allowing the president to choose his deputy as prime minister, Lerroux tacitly gave Alcalá-Zamora the right to meddle in the internal affairs of his party, undermining his control of the organisation. The Martínez Barrio government would mark the beginning of the end of Lerroux’s Radical Party as the excluded leader no longer had a monopoly on patronage to reinforce his charismatic authority.
In order to form his government, Martínez Barrio accepted that the Radicals would not organise the next election. The key post of interior minister went to another ‘neutral’ figure, Manuel Rico-Avello. While Lerroux regarded him as a man of ‘good will’, ‘noble character’ and ‘good intentions’, he noted that Rico-Avello had little political experience. For the Radical leader, his appointment was due to Alcalá-Zamora, ‘until yesterday a traditional cacique and now the guardian of electoral virtue’.7 But Rico-Avello’s presence also reflected Martínez Barrio’s pledge to the left republicans that no party would be given an electoral advantage. The new interior minister was certainly conscious of what was expected of him, telling reporters that his role was like a football referee enforcing fair play on the field.
The government’s promise of honest elections did not make sense to Lerroux. He knew that corruption still took place at local level as municipal authorities determined the results of numerous rural districts. Like everyone else, he was also unsure about how the millions of new female voters would act. He worried about the future of his precious liberal democratic Republic. On the left, the Radicals and their allies were confronted by a powerful socialist movement that had largely subscribed to an anti-democratic collectivist project; on the right, they were faced by the Rightist Union, a national electoral coalition made up of die-hard monarchists and the more moderate CEDA. Fragmentation accompanied political polarisation as the left republican parties disintegrated. Having lived through the crisis of the liberal monarchy between 1918 and 1923, Lerroux believed that Rico-Avello’s notion of electoral fair play would inevitably produce a parliament that would not provide the strong governments necessary to consolidate the Republic. In this context, the Radical leader argued that it was essential that the government intervened in the electoral contest to create a Cortes where the forces of loyal centrist republicans were superior to those of the left and right. Only then would the risk of a sharp pendular movement from collectivism to monarchism be eliminated.
Such an attitude revealed the true nature of Lerroux as a Restoration politician. For him, general elections created parliaments that confirmed the confidence shown by the president to the governing party. The future of Spain could not be left to voters politically socialised by weak, divided and polarised parties. The evils of fragmentation had to be avoided by a single official electoral slate backed by the human and material resources of the state. This did not mean that the Radicals and their allies should not campaign to win votes; rather government intervention would only be decisive if Lerroux’s candidates matched the energy of their opponents. This was not a cynical betrayal of his democratic credentials; the Radical leader was the only republican who could justly boast of a long record in the struggle for the vote. But he knew that a passive interior minister would not produce clean elections; it would simply ensure that corruption in localities lacking effective political competition would favour somebody else. If it was going to happen anyway, Lerroux reasoned, it was surely better that any fraudulent practises should serve the noble objective of producing stable government. In any case, Lerroux believed that the days when a government could easily ‘make’ elections were long gone. He also shared the respect that dynastic monarchists had showed towards unfavourable electoral results produced by a mobilised electorate and proper party competition. Faced with defeat, their reaction was either to mitigate its scale through new parliamentary alliances or wait until the government had discredited itself. The latter was Lerroux’s preferred strategy from December 1931, bringing him all too briefly into power less than two years later. If Lerroux remained essentially a politician from the Restoration era, he did not share the vices of the socialists and the left republicans, who inherited from those who fought for power during the turbulent revolutionary years of 1868 to 1874 the conviction that elections were only legitimate if they won. For Azaña, Domingo and the PSOE, the popular vote was only a means to confirm – not question – their own political agendas, which were conflated with the Republic. If elections endangered their hold on power, they could conceive of no other option than that of breaking with the ‘corrupt’ regime and ‘saving’ the Republic by use of force. By definition, this meant that their enemies could never legitimately take office, irrespective of whether they obtained a parliamentary majority. To avoid such an awful outcome, the socialists and the left republicans were prepared to use the same tactics of electoral manipulation used by monarchists under Alfonso XIII; indeed, they had already done so in June 1931.
Lerroux’s worst fears began to be realised in the early stages of the electoral campaign. Although the prime minister was not wholly ineffective, his lack of experience against a mobilised PSOE and a confident Rightist Union was telling. Martínez Barrio would later defend his poor performance by stressing a supposed desire to run a clean election, but at the time he believed that he would secure a clear Radical victory by simply being in power. To assuage the mounting concerns of his Radical colleagues, Lerroux threw himself into the campaign, but the party leader was much less confident than the prime minister, predicting that centrist republicans would have to obtain the support of conservatives to govern. Since he was determined to make the Radicals the largest single party, he rejected any national electoral pact with the left republicans, and authorised joint electoral slates with conservatives in provinces where the PSOE appeared dominant. Moreover, Lerroux increasingly used rightist language in his speeches to lure voters away from the CEDA. At his final campaign rally in Madrid, the former foreign minister told his followers that they should not become obsessed with labels. If it is right-wing to prioritise the consolidation of a regime that had ‘come at great sacrifice’ by ‘appealing to those willing to accept republican legality’ and ensuring that ‘reforms are carried out at a pace that reflects the country’s needs’, then ‘the Radical Party is right-wing’.8 But despite his efforts, Lerroux could not prevent a comprehensive conservative victory in the first round of voting. The latter took 206 out of 377 allocated seats, with the Radicals obtaining barely 75. Lerroux did much better than his rivals on the left: the PSOE won less than 30 seats while Azaña was left with a derisory rump of five deputies.9
The result surpassed the expectations of rightist leaders, including Gil-Robles, who had not expected that conservatives would dominate the new parliament. Lerroux, on the other hand, was furious with Martínez Barrio, and blamed his deputy for running a ‘stupid’ campaign that could inflict a fatal blow on the Republic. The Radical leader was conscious that if the Rightist Union was regarded as an enemy of the Republic, its spectacular victory could be construed as a plebiscite against the new regime. Unlike other republican leaders who were too stunned to react, Lerroux moved quickly to prevent this narrative from taking root. Taking advantage of the fact that his party had largely survived the republican catastrophe, he told journalists that those who had pursued revolutionary dogmatism and collectivist experiments, satisfied anti-Catholic cravings and defended the damaging prolongation of parliament, were paying the electoral price. Resistance to broadening the bases of the support for the Republic, he fumed, had left her bereft of the support from the majority of Spaniards in less than three years. Lerroux appealed to the victors not to begin ‘a movement to restore the monarchy’ but to ‘enter the Republic’. If they did so, he promised that the Radical Party would work with them to create a strong centre-right majority government capable of liberal and conservative change. Gil-Robles, Martínez de Velasco and Cambó responded to this overture positively, as they saw the election results as a demand for a change of direction rather than as a plebiscite against the Republic. Indeed, Martínez de Velasco instructed his thirty or so deputies of the Agrarian Party to make an explicit declaration of loyalty to the Republic.10
Lerroux’s strategy nearly collapsed when Martínez Barrio made the unrealistic demand that conservative leaders make republican ‘expressions of faith’. Miguel de Unamuno, part of the Radical electoral slate for Madrid, captured Lerroux’s thoughts better when he remarked that ‘it was enough’ that the right ‘obeyed the regime’ after the series of ‘legal outrages’ perpetrated by the constituent assembly between 1931 and 1933. Nevertheless, Martínez Barrio ignored the mood music of his party leader, and announced that the Radicals were prepared to enter an electoral alliance with left republicans and socialists in those provinces where a second round of elections was going to take place because no candidate had obtained the necessary 40% vote threshold. Lerroux quickly criticised his deputy, refusing to walk ‘arm in arm’ with those ‘responsible’ for the electoral disaster, and threatened to resign if the party’s National Committee adopted Martínez Barrio’s proposal at its meeting of 22 November. The evening before the crucial vote, the Radical leader make clear his direction of travel when he met Cándido Casanueva, a friend and close associate of Gil-Robles, at his home. The latter promised CEDA support for a Radical government, and both politicians agreed that their parties should fight the second round together in those constituencies where the Catholics were not already in alliance with monarchists. Lerroux’s approach prevailed within the party and reaped the electoral rewards: the centre-right electoral coalition won 63 out of the remaining 95 seats, with the Radicals finally ending up with 102 deputies. Nevertheless, the CEDA remained the largest party with 115 seats.11
Lerroux had overcome the most difficult situation yet faced by the Republic by widening divisions between the accidentalists of the CEDA and monarchists. Yet this feat was predicated on delivering substantial constitutional reform. The Radical leader faced the difficult task of satisfying conservative demands while maintaining those changes that they regarded as welcome and legitimate. This was not, despite the claims of their leftist opponents, the politics of surrender. The objective remained the nationalisation of the Republic. For the regime of 1931 to survive, it had to be released from any particular political agenda. Nevertheless, although Lerroux had worked hard to take his party to the centre-right, his pact with former monarchists generated new internal tensions, especially in those regions where the right was the Radicals’ main rival. The new government’s political honeymoon was short.
Martínez Barrio Splits the Radical Party
Despite the compelling parliamentary arithmetic, Lerroux’s prospective CEDA-backed minority administration faced a double challenge before it could take office. The most tragic was the anarchosyndicalist insurrection at the start of December which produced 125 deaths and 200 seriously injured. This revolutionary response to the electoral result was at that point the bloodiest rising in twentieth century Spanish history. Less violent, but equally serious, was the pressure of leftist leaders on Alcalá-Zamora to dissolve the Cortes before a government supported by ‘enemies of the regime’ could be formed. Martínez Barrio, the outgoing prime minister and Lerroux’s less than loyal deputy, was sympathetic to these attempts to overturn the electoral verdict of November. He suggested that Lerroux should sponsor a Radical-left republican coalition government that would call fresh elections if it were defeated in a parliamentary confidence vote. His boss was not prepared to listen to such ‘drivel’ and, with the approval of the president, finally formed his second government on 16 December 1933. The new parliamentary speaker was Santiago Alba, the former liberal monarchist and now Radical politician. An experienced figure – he first entered the Cortes at the same time as Lerroux and Melquíades Álvarez in 1901 – Alba was chosen by Lerroux to provide substance to his vision of extending the Republic to all who were prepared to work for her loyally. He proved to be an inspired choice, as Alba would prove to be an excellent mediator between Radicals and conservatives, mainly because of his friendly ties with the Agrarian Party.12
The composition of the new government was the first step towards the construction of a solid centre-right majority. Apart from the Radicals, it included the liberal democrats of Melquíades Álvarez and two associates of Alcalá-Zamora, Pita Romero and Cirilo del Río. Yet the star signing for Lerroux was José María Cid y Ruiz-Zorrilla who despite his impeccable republican lineage – scion no less of the prime minister of the First Republic – represented the Agrarian Party. In sum, these ministerial appointments guaranteed the votes of around 150 deputies, although the parliamentary backing of the CEDA and the Lliga was still necessary for an overall majority. Nevertheless, as Gil-Robles shared the same aversion to radical swings of the political pendulum as Lerroux, the CEDA leader was prepared for the moment to eschew office and back the new government from the backbenches as long as the Radicals delivered on its electoral promises of political change.
It was not his allies but his own deputy that provoked the first trouble from within the government. Martínez Barrio refused to join the cabinet when he heard that Cid had been offered a job. Apart from his refusal to work with rightists, the former prime minister was piqued at Lerroux’s choice of Alba as parliamentary speaker, since constitutional tradition suggested that the former monarchist was now the front-runner to replace the septuagenarian as Radical leader. Lerroux was determined to prevent the emergence of a leftist faction within the party and threatened Martínez Barrio that he would refuse to form a government if his deputy remained aloof.13 This was sufficient to produce a U-turn from the latter, but despite joining the cabinet, he refused to come to terms with the new situation and his public criticism of government policy fed rumours of an imminent party split.
The prime minister had little sympathy for Martínez Barrio, who was firmly told to cast any doubts about policy aside and follow party discipline. For Lerroux, his deputy was the last person who had the right to lecture him about the dangers to the Republic, as the new government was the product of ‘inexorable reality’ and ‘patriotism’ caused by the former prime minister’s disastrous brief spell in power that had produced the electoral defeat. Even Martínez Barrio acknowledged openly that the results of November 1933 entailed at best an all-republican government with the support of the right. Yet by the beginning of 1934, Lerroux began to prepare his party for the prospect of sharing power with CEDA leaders tired of living on ‘parliamentary charity’. He did not fear this eventuality, seeing it as a significant step towards incorporating the CEDA within the Republic, which would ensure a full parliamentary term and essential constitutional reform. Most important of all, it would show that the Republic was inclusive, as in the context of a ‘free and just’ political system, it was ‘legitimate’ that the right had the same opportunity as their leftist opponents ‘to serve the Patria’. After all, Lerroux reasoned, the Radicals had previously governed with adversaries such as the socialists and catalanists, and had even supported the elevation of a renowned monarchist like Alcalá-Zamora to the presidency. Why ‘should we feel repugnance for striking a noble deal [with] former conservative elements, the majority of whom had never previously been actively involved in politics?’14
Martínez Barrio thought otherwise. He could only conceive of a ‘Republic governed by the republicans’; only those involved in the original coalition of April 1931 had the right to hold power. In a speech given in Madrid’s Victoria Theatre on 21 January 1934, he told his ministerial colleagues in the audience that they could not operate with ‘full authority’ if they had to negotiate ‘daily’ with their conservative allies. But what was the alternative? Martínez Barrio urged the government that it ‘should dream’ of having the support of ‘the majority of the Chamber’ and if this did ‘not accord with parliamentary realities, present its resignation’.15 To put it bluntly, this was merely a variant of the tune played by left republicans in the aftermath of their electoral catastrophe: parliamentary government was to be discarded in favour of fresh elections with the president’s blessing. This was not an option that Lerroux was ever going to entertain, and in February, his disillusioned apprentice prepared his departure from government by giving a candid interview in Blanco y Negro. Martínez Barrio complained that minority government could not bring ‘authority’ and ‘prestige’ as it represented ‘daily capitulation’ to the right. A centre-right administration led by Lerroux may be feasible in terms of parliamentary logic, he went on to say, but it did not have the ‘backing’ of ‘public opinion’. Therefore, ‘as a man of the left’, he felt that he could longer remain a minister, although he reiterated his loyalty to Lerroux and criticised the socialists’ decision to prepare an insurrection.
The fact that Martínez Barrio’s one-time allies were organising the overthrow of a democratically elected government would not have been news to Blanco y Negro readers. Remarkably, Largo Caballero and Prieto had already revealed their revolutionary intentions publicly, with the former finance minister even making his declaration in parliament. After the executive committees of both the PSOE and UGT had concluded that the ruling centre-right administration was both anti-republican and anti-socialist, they created a committee to co-ordinate a rising that would depose Lerroux and establish a new government that would manage the ‘transitional period towards full Socialism’. At this stage, the only disagreement between the conspirators was whether they should wait until the CEDA took office. As Martínez Barrio himself admitted, he chose to destabilise the government at a time when ‘the whole world knew that the workers’ organisations were moving towards a revolutionary objective’; he had no doubt that for socialist leaders ‘an explosion was inevitable’.16
The Blanco y Negro interview damaged the relationship between the Radical Party and the CEDA and therefore threatened the government’s majority. Lerroux fired his deputy on 3 March 1934 as part of a more general Cabinet reshuffle prompted by Alcalá-Zamora’s determination to force the Radical education minister Pareja Yébenes out of office after the latter committed the cardinal sin of ignoring the president’s suggestion to appoint some of his friends as university rectors. To the surprise of Martínez Barrio, his formulaic pronouncements of loyalty did not impress the parliamentary party which gave the prime minister its full confidence on 27 April, despite previous internal grumblings about legislation that temporarily gave the poorest priests and clerics a modest pension.17
The breach between the prime minister and Martínez Barrio widened in the following fortnight. The prime minister became more irritated at the former minister’s depiction of himself as a sacrificial lamb to the right. More ominously, Martínez Barrio had already begun to organise a new organisation, the Radical Democratic Party, openly courting Radical deputies like Sánchez Román and the Radical-Socialists under Félix Gordón. On 16 May 1934, Martínez Barrio formally left the Radicals. Lerroux never forgave him for the split.18
The creation of the Radical Democrat Party was a blow to the prime minister, but it could have been much worse. Martínez Barrio hoped to attract half of the Radical parliamentary party to his side including those from his powerbase in Andalusia, Valencian deputies of the Blasco – Ibáñez tradition, and (given his rank as Grand Master), Freemasons. In the end, only 17 joined the Radical Democrats, and the government kept its overall majority. Most Radicals understood why their leader had reached out to the right, and did not see it as a betrayal of the party’s traditions or policy since 1931. But the split did weaken the Radical Party’s role as the axis of the centre-right coalition and a moderating influence on the CEDA. Ironically, it actually increased Lerroux’s dependence on his allies, although the lack of internal opposition would create fewer obstacles to closer relations.
The End of Lerroux’s Second Government
To complicate matters further, the prime minister’s relationship with Alcalá-Zamora began to deteriorate markedly in the spring of 1934. When he took office, Lerroux intended to involve the restless president in affairs of state, abandoning Azaña’s attempts to reduce him to a constitutional cypher. He not only consulted Alcalá-Zamora over government bills, but he also permitted ministers to communicate directly with the president as the prime minister regarded them as better placed to inform the president of the details of proposed legislation. Yet this courtesy was misconstrued by Alcalá-Zamora as a licence to intervene in the minutiae of government business. Lerroux soon repented a decision to allow the president to participate in Cabinet meetings, as Alcala-Zamora’s interminable contributions threatened to monopolise the discussions. Moreover, frequent contact with ministers only served to alienate them from their head of state. Few appreciated his interference in their work, and the president’s penchant for manipulation, smears and insinuation made ministerial office a burden rather than a reward. As Lerroux perceptively observed, the president’s growing isolation reflected his ‘demanding and possessive’ personality that displayed a clear ‘lack of confidence’ in the ‘abilities of others’.19
Alcalá-Zamora’s sense of superiority over ministers was born out of greater political experience based on an encyclopaedic knowledge of public law. Although he shared with Lerroux a desire to recalibrate the Republic along liberal lines after two years of leftist government, his growing interventionism was based on an arbitrary definition of powers that undermined the legitimate role that the double confidence system gave to the government, parliament and the electorate. For exasperated party leaders, the president’s political activism seemed motivated only by partisanship. The manner in which he exercised his prerogatives exposed major errors in his understanding of the political situation, a lack of confidence in his governments and a brazen disregard for the crucial role of political parties in a parliamentary democracy.
Yet we should not forget that Alcalá-Zamora first made his political career in the factionalism of the last years of the Restoration period. His late conversion to republicanism did not alter his fundamentally personalistic view of politics. He saw it as his duty to incorporate former monarchists into the Republic, and never accepted the failure of his Liberal Republican Right party. Its successor, the Progressive Party, remained the same tiny band of notables who had followed him before 1923. As a politician lacking a popular base, he did all he could to prevent parties circumscribing his room for manoeuvre by encouraging political fragmentation within the Cortes. In this, he benefited from Lerroux’s leadership style. In footballing parlance, if Alcalá-Zamora led from the front, the prime minister preferred to act as a sweeper, co-ordinating the efforts of his ministerial colleagues and preventing any internal disputes from threatening the cohesion of his coalition government. Much to the consternation of his younger and more forceful subordinates, the veteran politician soon found that the demands of the president and party management – Lerroux did not delegate the latter – consumed ever larger amounts of his energy and time.
A clash of personalities helps explain why the amnesty law turned a dispute about the relationship between the president and his government into a full-blown constitutional crisis. The measure had formed part of the election manifestos of the Radicals and the Rightist Union, although Lerroux saw amnesty somewhat differently to Gil-Robles. He believed that it should apply to the left, namely to anarchosyndicalists who had been pushed into revolt by the sectarianism of their socialist rivals. Yet the most polemical feature of the legislation was the proposed annulment of the punishments imposed on high-ranking members of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and the Berenguer government; this would allow monarchist exiles and those persecuted by Azaña such as José Calvo Sotelo and Juan March to resume their political lives in Spain. It also commuted Sanjurjo’s prison sentence and ended the detention and deportation of those suspected of involvement in the August 1932 coup. For the prime minister, the purpose of the amnesty law was not to make a moral statement about the nature of guilt of those encompassed by the decree. He simply wanted to put an end to the wearisome matter of responsibilities, which punished some but not others for the same kinds of activity. For example, was it justice that Berenguer and his ministers faced trial for defending the constitutional monarchy against the republican insurrection of Jaca and Cuatro Vientos? Why were some associates of Primo de Rivera sentenced while others (like socialist leaders) did very well under the Republic? Lerroux also saw amnesty as a second chance to those who (in his mind at least) had not risen against the Republic but against the modus operandi of the Azaña government. The prime minister believed that a liberal and accommodating Republic would make any further appeal to violence futile.20
Alcalá-Zamora had a more realistic view of the mollifying virtues of amnesties. He agreed with Lerroux that the Azaña government was to blame for the revolts of the previous three years, and certainly did not want the responsibilities issue to bedevil Spanish politics further.21 Yet the president firmly opposed the return into the armed forces of officers expelled by administrative order for serving the dictatorship in the 1920s or taking part in the August 1932 coup. With the support of leftist parties and Miguel Maura, he declared them a threat to the Republic. However, Lerroux and his parliamentary supporters did not yield, arguing that these dismissals were arbitrary and partisan, and conservatives wondered why the government should announce an amnesty that was less generous than the one given by the constitutional monarchy to rebel socialists and republicans in 1917. Characteristically, Lerroux attempted to assuage Alcalá-Zamora’s concerns, assuring him that convicted officers would not return to the army and Sanjurjo would be packed off into exile. He even accepted the president’s suggested amendments to the legislation. But Alcalá-Zamora refused to sign the bill after it passed the Cortes, and urged parliament to think again. When the government dismissed this stratagem, a reluctant president finally gave way, although his signature was accompanied by a long dissenting statement. Lerroux interpreted Alcalá-Zamora’s unconstitutional behaviour as a withdrawal of confidence and resigned on 28 April 1934. His government had lasted scarcely four months.
Lerroux’s self-immolation ended a constitutional crisis. His conservative allies, appalled by Alcalá-Zamora’s actions, saw the president as a significant roadblock to the delivery of centre-right reform. His sectarianism, they reflected, was shown by the fact that he did not employ similar methods to frustrate the laws of the republican-socialist administration, including controversial measures restricting civil liberties. After hearing the news of Lerroux’s resignation, the Lliga leader Cambó sounded out the speaker Alba and other centre-right party leaders in an attempt to save the government. He proposed that they pass a parliamentary motion expressing overwhelming support for Lerroux that would be seen as a condemnation of the president. If they could secure three-fifths of deputies to support them, Alcalá-Zamora could be constitutionally dismissed, and the vacancy would be offered to Lerroux. This scheme met with approval with all except the Agrarian leader Martínez de Velasco, and the CEDA’s Casanueva was delegated to sound out Lerroux. However, despite their friendship, the Radical leader wanted nothing to do with it. Obsessed with the instability of the First Republic, he thought it essential that Alcalá-Zamora serve out his full constitutional term. Moreover, the idea that the president could be sacked on the votes of monarchists was a difficult pill to swallow. Seeing that it was a hopeless task, Casanueva desisted, although not before warning the outgoing prime minister that ‘he does not know Don Niceto’ and that the president will not thank him for his loyalty. Keeping Alcala-Zamora in his post, Lerroux’s friend averred, condemns the Republic ‘to perdition’. The Radical leader would later have plenty of time to reflect on this shrewd prediction.22
On losing the premiership for the second time, Lerroux could not look back on a very fruitful period in office. He did manage to consolidate his partnership with the conservatives by suspending the bans on religious education and clerical pensions, and negotiated a modus vivendi with the Vatican. In non-religious matters, he passed the amnesty law and ended socialist control of labour arbitration boards and the rural labour market. There was also a minor international triumph with the occupation of Ifni, an African territory south of Morocco and opposite the Canary Islands. Roughly equivalent in size to Vizcaya province, the Spanish claim to the area dated from the Catholic Kings of the fifteenth century and was confirmed by the Wad-Ras Treaty with Morocco in 1860. Nevertheless, it could only be made effective after the end of the Rif war in the 1920s and Lerroux’s successful negotiations with the French prime minister Gastón Doumergue, which secured the tolerance of the dominant power in the region. In a modest sense, the Radical leader’s old dreams of African expansion were realised; unlike most other prime ministers, he could point to an increase in Spanish territory under his watch.23
The fall of Lerroux created a thorny political problem. As his demise was due to the actions of the president, it seemed unthinkable that Alcalá-Zamora would turn to the Radical leader to form another government. The alternatives were Gil-Robles, as leader of the largest parliamentary party, or the main opposition party, the PSOE, which would expect fresh elections. Since it was known that the president did not favour either option, Lerroux expected that he would return to office swiftly having scored a bloodless victory over the head of state. He was therefore perplexed to receive a visit from one of his former ministers, Ricardo Samper, who wanted his consent to form a government. ‘A long-standing republican, a prestigious intellectual and democrat from Valencia, a good lawyer [and] an eloquent orator’, the Radical leader wrote of his political ally, a man of ‘much worth’. Samper had been his contact man with the party’s Blasco-Ibáñez faction in Valencia and a person of ‘order’ and ‘governmental spirit’.24
For all his personal merits, Samper’s nomination provoked fury within the Radical Party, as memories of the Martínez Barrio government were all too fresh for those who wanted to maintain party unity. But Lerroux saw a Samper administration as an interim measure that would allow the president to save face; he decided to support his subordinate as prime minster in the hope that this would rebuild his relationship with Alcalá-Zamora. In the meantime, he was confident that he could control the government from the outside with Samper’s blessing. This did not seem unrealistic. The new prime minister’s cabinet was the same as its predecessor, with even Salazar Alonso, a bitter opponent of Alcalá-Zamora, remaining as interior minister. With the socialists openly conspiring against the government and the new fascist Falange active, Lerroux saw Salazar as a safe pair of hands to meet the threat from paramilitary bands of the left and right.25
The Radical leader knew that leadership was not one of Samper’s talents, and indeed this was the very reason why the president favoured him as prime minister. With the departure of Lerroux, the government ceased to be a coherent entity, as the greenhorn Samper could not impose his authority on ministers. Indeed, he felt overwhelmed and did not try to defend the prerogatives of his office, allowing Alcalá-Zamora to co-opt the powers of the prime minister. The president led cabinet meetings and shaped the legislative agenda, while Samper struggled to smooth over the increasingly fierce clashes between Alcalá-Zamora and his ministers. In particular, the president’s determination to ensure a balanced budget provoked complaints from Manuel Marraco, the finance minister, as the Radical wanted to continue with a public works programme to alleviate unemployment. By the summer of 1934, disenchanted ministers paid daily homage to Lerroux at his home, and the Radical leader stiffened their resolve, dismissing any talk of resignations under presidential pressure. This backing was especially important not just to Marraco but also Salazar Alonso, as the Interior minister despaired of Alcalá-Zamora’s refusal to permit a search of the socialist Casa del Pueblo in Madrid for weapons. Lerroux himself was mystified at Alcalá-Zamora’s order of priorities, asking why he was insisting on a balanced budget if the Republic was unable to maintain confidence in the economy due to an inability to keep public order.26
The political situation only deteriorated further during the summer of 1934. The workers’ left continued their preparations for a revolutionary uprising. The PSOE had formed a Workers’ Alliance with the communists and part of the anarchosyndicalist movement to organise the insurrection, which would take the form of a revolutionary general strike. In those areas where the Workers’ Alliance was strong, attacks on property was already taking place on a daily basis. Socialist mayors also encouraged or sponsored the boycott of public events held by centre-right organisations, and political strikes were endemic. Even a reluctant Samper concluded that these acts were but a prelude to insurrection. The most serious was the violent attempt by the rural branch of the UGT to prevent the collection of the harvest in June 1934. Its leaders did attempt to spark a rising, but the government declared the strike illegal and saved the harvest. This setback did not end the conspiracy, as that September the authorities uncovered an enormous stash of weapons stolen from state arms factories and deposited with the Asturian UGT by Prieto and Juan Negrín. These were not the first weapons taken from public stores. Other seizures included pistols and machine-guns taken from police warehouses in 1933 when Manuel Andrés was Azaña’s police minister. The authorities feared that an insurrection was imminent. Soon after the discovery of the Asturian arms dump, Lerroux warned Samper to suspend the transfer of the remains of republican martyrs Galán and García Hernández to a crypt under the Puerta de Alcalá in Madrid as the Workers’ Alliance planned to disrupt the ceremony with a mass demonstration. The insurrection would start, the Radical leader informed the prime minister, with the arrest of Alcalá-Zamora and the government, as their presence at the celebrations had previously been publicised.27
If things were not bad enough, the Samper government faced a significant challenge to its authority in the Basque Country and Catalonia. In the north, the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), with the backing of leftist parties, illegally attempted on 12 August to restrict elections to Basque provincial councils to nationalist controlled local authorities. In the northeast, the situation was more serious as the catalanist Esquerra had joined the revolutionary conspiracy. Using its majority in the Catalan parliament, the Esquerra passed a law that transferred to the rabasaires, tenant vineyard farmers organised in an Esquerra controlled union, the land they cultivated. Aided by the Lliga, aggrieved landowners took the Catalan government to the Constitutional Court in Madrid, and succeeded in getting the law struck down as an infringement of powers reserved to the central state. This only escalated the crisis, as the Esquerra defied the sentence by passing an identical law and withdrawing its deputies from the Cortes. In this constitutional battle, the catalanists could count on the support of the socialists and left republicans; Azaña told parliament that the Catalan authorities were the only truly republican power left in Spain. Samper sought to end the conflict peacefully with secret negotiations with Luis Companys, the Generalidad prime minister, but the latter had already committed himself to the socialist-led insurrection. By September, catalanist paramilitaries were openly on the streets and the escamots, an Esquerra militia, attacked the Barcelona provincial court. Even more unsettling for the government was the fact that the distinction between the police and the separatist militias began to erode as Companys appointed members of the latter to public order positions.
For Lerroux, Samper’s inability to deal with the nationalist challenge was the final straw. The government survived a vote of confidence on 4 July on condition that it ended the Catalan crisis by forcing the Generalidad to respect the decision of the Constitutional Court. Lerroux was obliged to deal with Gil-Robles directly to prevent the CEDA from withdrawing its support from Samper, but he tired of the prime minister’s ‘summer siesta’ which he attributed to the paralysing influence of Alcalá-Zamora. The Radical leader was in a quandary. Convinced that a CEDA entry into government would provoke a left-wing rebellion, he was not too enthusiastic about Gil-Robles’ demands for a presence at the cabinet table, but neither did he want to lead yet another minority government because the socialists had ‘vetoed’ the entry of his conservative allies. With the backing of his deputies, Lerroux began conversations with other parties in September to explore the possibility of a new majoritarian centre-right administration. Since he knew that the president would not withdraw his confidence in Samper, he made a compact with his allies that they would withdraw their support for the government when the Cortes reopened on 1 October. The days of a caretaker prime minister were finally at an end.28
When it became apparent that he had no choice, Alcalá-Zamora asked Lerroux to form a government. The Radical leader allocated seven ministerial posts to his party with Samper obtaining the foreign ministry as a reward for his continued loyalty. The other six went to his coalition partners, including three for the CEDA. All those chosen by Gil-Robles had republican backgrounds; José Oriol Anguera de Sojo, a former Supreme Court prosecutor, was handed the labour portfolio; Manuel Giménez Fernández and Rafael Aizpún were given agriculture and justice respectively. The list did not please Alcalá-Zamora, but his efforts to reduce the presence of the CEDA came to nought as Lerroux was not prepared to make a ‘humiliating offer’ to the largest party in the Cortes, especially when the president’s attempted proscription of the CEDA provoked fury among Gil-Robles and his colleagues.29 Lerroux appeased Alcalá-Zamora by dropping Salazar Alonso and finding room for the president’s friend Martínez de Velasco. On 4 October 1934, Lerroux formed his third government. The socialists now had their pretext; the insurrection was not long in coming.