Much Ado About Nothing
(1935–1936)
Miguel Maura liked to escape to Lerroux’s retreat in San Rafael to elude Madrid’s oppressive summer heat. In 1933, he had an added incentive to go into the mountains. With the republican-socialist coalition government on the ropes, the Radical leader invited him to his home ostensibly to coordinate their tactics against Azaña. Maura quickly realised that Lerroux wanted to go further; his host saw the premiership within his grasp and wanted to make the former monarchist his party deputy in order to make the Radicals more attractive to moderate voters. He promised Maura a generous allocation of parliamentary seats and ministerial posts and even recognised that he treated his father Antonio badly a quarter of a century earlier.
Although the interior minister of 1931 appreciated the gesture, he flatly refused: ‘I cannot work with you in any government today, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow’. It was not Lerroux who was the problem, he explained, but ‘the utterly disagreeable people who surround you, and who will eventually ditch you’. A stunned Radical leader asked ‘What are you saying to me, Miguel, my friend? . . . Who are you talking about? For better or worse, I have old friends who have been my loyal companions in the struggles during the heroic years, and now I have to reward and attend to them. You know, my dear Miguel, that I always value and take care of my friends. Have some committed peccadillos in the past? What am I to do? That for me, as the French say, is the rançon de la gloire [price of glory]’. Lerroux’s explanation did not convince. ‘The glory of yourself, Don Alejandro’, replied Maura, ‘but not me. I have had nothing do with your past and I fear for the future if it is anything like [your past]’. This was too much for Lerroux. He criticised Maura for suggesting three years earlier that he could not be trusted with the post of justice minister in the Provisional Government for fear that his cronies would sale sentences. The awkward conversation came to end abruptly without agreement.1
Maura’s qualms did not preclude him standing alongside Lerroux for Madrid or his followers agreeing electoral pacts with the Radicals that November, but this anecdote shows well what Lerroux’s allies of 1931 thought of the Radicals’ moral standards. In their eyes, the supposed venality of the party made it unsuitable for government. Yet in reality realpolitik shaped Maura’s ethical outrage against Lerroux; the Radical leader was the most significant obstacle to the emergence of an alternative popular conservative republican movement. Given Maura’s own political past, it is somewhat ironic that his denunciations of Radical sleaze only served a broader agenda to delegitimise Spain’s constitutional experience before the Primo de Rivera coup of September 1923. The left in particular argued that April 1931 represented a clean break; Azaña was just one of many who dismissed the political traditions and practises of the past as the systematic plunder of public resources by the powerful few. Despite being republican, Lerroux’s party was the embodiment of old corruption. As the socialist leader Largo Caballero cruelly put it to journalists when he heard that Lerroux was about to form his first all-Radical government in September 1933: ‘Only the Radicals? . . . then just round up eleven gypsies from Peñuelas [a Madrid slum district] and everything will be sorted’.2
Such slander aroused Lerroux’s fury. The fact that the Radical Party contained morally dubious individuals who used public positions for their own interests hardly made it exceptional in Spanish politics or even within the Spanish republican movement. The ‘weaknesses’ so often attributed to the Radical leader were in reality inevitable concessions to reality. As Max Weber recognised, the professionalisation of politics during a transitory phase where most public posts remained unpaid produced a culture where the charismatic leader could only safeguard the loyalty of his closest followers through material and non-material rewards. Lerroux modernised the clientelist practises of the early nineteenth century in the sense of making the economic benefits of public service available to those previously excluded from politics. As we have seen, favours and recommendations characterised Lerroux’s modus operandi from his days as a revolutionary agitator in Barcelona. Party members at all levels wrote or visited his home in calle O’Donnell in the hope that they could benefit from the legendary generosity of Don Alejandro.
Lerroux’s largesse was not restricted to public funds. He liberally distributed his own money for party purposes. Even harsh critics like Alcalá-Zamora and Prieto recognised that he ‘donated’ money with ‘open hands’. Lerroux created ‘pensions for widows of fallen comrades’ and those ‘old republicans without means’ as ‘no-one in need went without’. His house even became known as a ‘little hotel’ because (among other reasons), it provided a roof to desperate friends and their families. This was also true of his chalet complex in Gudillos, where those suffering from tuberculosis could recover in the mountain air. Among the beneficiaries was Joaquín Vila, an old but impoverished party chum from Barcelona, whose family was given the task of managing the estate. But Lerroux’s munificence was not restricted to Radicals. To the disgust of some, he also gave José Primo de Rivera a job in his administrative team. The eldest brother of the dead dictator had been sacked from a bank as an enemy of the Republic when the left was in power despite being apolitical and close to retirement.
Lerroux’s recourse to patronage on a grand scale generated continual problems of finance. Excluding the Radicals’ somewhat patchy record in local government, the party spent most of its history in opposition, forcing Lerroux to rely on his own money and donations that he could obtain from wealthy backers which often came with strings attached. Changing political circumstances led to periods of personal debt in which the Radical leader struggled to meet the financial demands of his party and its press. The massive growth of the Radicals after April 1931 only complicated matters further as increased income did not satisfy the all the expectations of his enlarged clientelist network. As well as disappointed and disgruntled petitioners, Lerroux found that favours did not always grease the wheels effectively. His memoirs are full of complaints about the ingratitude shown by those he had helped. This does not imply that the republican ever seriously considered changing his way of doing politics. There is little evidence that Lerroux was interested in endowing his party with an efficient bureaucracy sustained by membership dues, press income or affiliated societies. Nor did he consider that the state should directly pay its politicians more.3
The Radicals did not even bother to hide their appropriation of public funds after the predictable howls of protest from political opponents. However, this was not the main reason for the party’s reputation for corruption. Lerroux was the only republican to create a truly national organisation that could challenge a socialist movement with its snout similarly in the public trough. The Radicals were the only moderate party during the Republic that had a realistic chance of winning enough seats to lead a government. This was not an achievement to which such paladins of virtue as Miguel Maura and Manuel Azaña could lay claim. After all, the conservative politician owed his career to the influence of his father rather than any popularity among the voters, while the left republican leader entered the Cortes in the 1931 and 1933 elections less due to the efforts of his own miniscule party than to agreements reached with the Radicals and the socialists respectively. Ultimately, the Radicals rebutted accusations of rapacity by their actions in government from 1933. There was no descent into an inferno of financial iniquity. The customary re-distribution of state posts and rewards provoked the understandable protests of those on the left who had previously enjoyed the fruits of power. While it is true that Alcalá-Zamora also privately thundered against Radical corruption, this had more to do with his general animus towards the party. CEDA leaders were pleasantly surprised to discover when working with Lerroux in government that their allies’ infamous reputation was not justified. As Gil-Robles recalled in his memoirs, the president’s complaints were nothing more than ‘vague accusations’, ‘generic allusions’ and ‘never . . . concrete cases’. Lerroux was furious with a head of state known as a ‘model cacique’ who still treated the Cordoban districts of La Carolina and Priego ‘as his own fiefdom’. How could someone who flagrantly used his own powers of patronage to keep together his exiguous band of political brothers accuse others of immorality?4 Alcalá-Zamora was hardly a credible champion for clean government.
Estraperlo
Before he went into his prime ministerial office, Lerroux generally rose early to deal with personal correspondence at home. On a cold morning in January 1935, he opened a large envelope with a foreign postmark and began to read its contents. The first lines of the letter left him dumbfounded; he turned immediately to the last page to learn the identity of its author: Strauss. He did not recognise the name, but read the document in full, with curiosity increasingly giving way to dismay.
The story it told was explosive. It revealed that Lerroux’s nephew Aurelio and various friends, all holding government or state company positions, met with Daniel Strauss, a German with a Mexican passport during the spring and summer of 1934. The latter wanted to distribute in Spain his roulette game, estraperlo, which had made a lot of money in Amsterdam and Ostend. Although games of chance were illegal, Strauss argued that his invention was based on speed and calculation rather than luck. After the failure of an approach to the Catalan authorities, the foreign businessman spoke to Juan Pich y Pon, Lerroux’s close friend in Catalonia who had responsibility for the merchant navy within the Samper government. Sniffing an opportunity for profit, Pich contacted Aurelio Lerroux and the latter agreed to join the board of a new company that would market estraperlo in return for using his political influence to get a gaming licence from Samper and his interior minister Salazar Alonso. In the letter, Strauss claimed that he handed over money and gifts to Radical politicians as part of his lobbying, and given Lerroux’s continued sway over the Samper administration, it seems unlikely that his son kept him out of the loop. As was to be expected, the government legalised estraperlo and Strauss installed the game in San Sebastian’s Gran Casino. Nevertheless, during the night of its inauguration on 12 September 1934, the civil governor closed down the premises on the orders of Salazar Alonso. Various players had complained that the house always seemed to win, and an inspection of the roulette wheel revealed an electric device that could control the outcome at the push of a button. The following day, the interior minister began a police investigation and banned estraperlo.5
In his letter, Strauss claimed that after he failed to get the casino reopened, his business partners urged him to take advantage of Salazar Alonso’s departure from the interior ministry in October to install the game at the plush Hotel Formentor de Pollensa in Majorca. Play began for ten days that December until Eloy Vaquero, the new interior minister, closed it again after receiving a tip-off from Gil-Robles. Strauss concluded his missive with a demand for 400,000 pesetas in compensation. He complained that the gifts and kickbacks had ruined him, and threatened to go public with all the juicy details of his relationship with Aurelio and other Radicals if he did not get what he wanted.
An alarmed prime minister immediately talked to those implicated in this case, and they confirmed their dealings with Strauss even if they denied profiting from them. While Lerroux latter dismissed the affair in his memoirs as an ‘imprudent lapse without importance’, he took it very seriously at the time, ordering a secret investigation into Strauss.6 This uncovered that his lawyer was a French left republican deputy called Henri Torres, who was also a member of an international assistance committee for the October 1934 rebels. Torres made contact with Lerroux’s faithful attorney Dámaso Vélez via Gastón Cohen in Madrid, and told him that his client was prepared to go to the courts if no compensation was forthcoming. The prime minister sought to reach an agreement through Vélez, but when Cohen refused to compromise, Lerroux brought off negotiations and vowed not to give in to blackmail.7
Strauss took his revenge. He spelled the beans to Martín Luis Guzmán, a Mexican journalist close to Azaña, while his lawyer Torres met Prieto in his Belgian exile. Events moved quickly. Guzmán brought Strauss and Prieto together at the Brussels International Exposition, and kept Azaña abreast of developments. The socialist leader took the initiative: in the Belgian capital, he discussed estraperlo with José Centeno, a close presidential adviser, and suggested that a detailed report of the Strauss affair be sent directly to Alcalá-Zamora. As Prieto was determined to exact full political advantage from Strauss’ dealings with the Radicals, he dismissed the option of taking the allegations to the police and made sure that the names of Radical figures unconnected with estraperlo were included in Centeno’s account. This landed on the president’s desk on 5 September, although it is possible that Alcalá-Zamora was forewarned of its contents, as the president insinuated during a conversation with the prime minister in August 1935 that Strauss had met Aurelio in Lerroux’s San Rafael residence.
In any case, Alcalá-Zamora did not hesitate to make use of the political dynamite placed at his disposal. He first raised the Strauss dossier with Samper and Juan José Rocha, a Radical minister close to Lerroux, before informing the prime minister himself on 16 September that he had received an envelope sent ‘by recorded post requiring acknowledgement of receipt’. He could not therefore ignore its contents, the president continued, and although it did not contain firm evidence that a crime had been committed, there was enough to suggest that Lerroux’s entourage were involved in shady activities. These comments by an experienced lawyer betrayed why Strauss decided to tarnish the political reputations of the Radicals rather than seeking justice in a courtroom. The prime minister rejected the allegations of the dossier, referring to German-Mexican’s attempts at blackmail and the results of his police investigation. This revealed that Strauss had a criminal record and been subject to two international expulsion orders. At this stage, Lerroux remained unconcerned about his political survival, regarding Strauss as a crook with little credibility. Courtesy of information supplied by Spanish diplomats in the Netherlands, he could also tell Alcalá-Zamora of Guzmán’s relationship with Strauss, suggesting that the charges were a political set-up by the left to destabilise his government.8
The prime minister was therefore surprised to learn on 18 September that the president wanted him to go public over the accusations, subtly suggesting that it would be best in order to forestall a leftist campaign in parliament. Lerroux remained resolute, deriding the moral authority of those with less than spotless records in government who had flagrantly broken the law less than a year earlier in October 1934. He was not prepared to publicise a subject that could provoke a torrent of rumours against his own nephew as well as his party. When the president insisted that it had to be done, Lerroux stormed out of the meeting suspecting that the president wanted a political scandal. His relationship with Alcalá-Zamora never recovered.
The Radical leader’s reaction may have been disproportionate, although it is true that the president’s motives are difficult to fathom. If, as he claimed later, he was simply worried about being involved in a political cover-up, then he could have handed over the dossier to the government for their opinion. If he had no confidence in Lerroux’s ability to deal with the allegations competently and thought it a legal issue, then he could have created a new government to carry out this task. Certainly, the republican president did not normally accept complaints directly from aggrieved citizens and Alcalá-Zamora should have returned the dossier to Strauss’ lawyer suggesting it was a matter for a judge. He could have even simply thrown it in the bin. He did none of these things. His scarcely concealed desire to use Strauss against the prime minister made him complicit in blackmail.9
Living One Hundred Years in Two Hours
Alcalá-Zamora did not dismiss Lerroux after the spat of 18 September. The prime minister’s resignation took place two days later following the departure from the cabinet of navy minister Antonio Royo-Villanova. His decision to quit in protest over the transfer of various public works programmes to the Generalidad ended the participation of the Agrarians from the government. Although the president indicated that Lerroux could continue without his junior coalition partner, the prime minister regarded their presence as essential. Moreover, since Chapaprieta’s cost-cutting measures envisaged reducing the size of the cabinet from thirteen to nine, Lerroux wanted to carry out a more thorough government reshuffle with the approval of the president.
The ball was in Alcalá-Zamora’s court. If he wanted a new prime minister, the only alternative was Gil-Robles. Since the PSOE had excluded themselves from power, the possibility of a minority leftist administration calling an election was political fantasy. After the obligatory consultations, the president decided to overcome this self-imposed dilemma by disregarding parliament altogether. When his attempts to interest Santiago Alba in the job were rebuffed, and the political world expected the return of Lerroux or a Gil-Robles government, the president pulled a rabbit out of the hat by asking Chapaprieta to form an administration on 25 September. Since the finance minister had not formally joined the Radicals, Alcalá-Zamora expected the Cortes to accept a non-party figure. If it refused, Chapaprieta would dissolve parliament.10
The president’s arbitrary exercise of his constitutional prerogatives left centre-right leaders stunned and bewildered. His actions were the clearest indication yet that Gil-Robles would never be offered the premiership despite leading the largest parliamentary party. Although Alcalá-Zamora has been dismissed as a mere ‘paperback’ Alfonso XIII, veteran monarchists such as Romanones and Abilio Calderón struggled to recall an occasion when the monarch acted in a similar manner. Even a staunch republican like César Jalón noted that while the king sought to throw his ‘golden lasso’ to overcome the fragmentation of the dynastic parties, no-one ‘could dare to defend’ how Alcalá-Zamora could ‘only pause for a minute [in the pursuit of] of his destabilising preoccupations’ or ‘the incision of his scalpel in the entrails of the moderate parties’.11 Given the circumstances, was there any other option to that of impeaching the president to force his resignation? If the necessary three-fifths of parliament could not be mustered for such a motion, the centre-right bloc could prepare for a new national poll by accelerating electoral reform and dropping unpopular austerity measures. At the most favourable and least divisive moment, the ruling coalition could then force through a dissolution of parliament. An united left might win a few seats, but a common electoral slate that encompassed monarchists as well as Radicals would be enough to secure a parliamentary majority, keep those who rebelled against the Republic in October 1934 outside government, and if there were enough votes, force Alcalá-Zamora out of office.
This could be the only basis for centre-right support for a Chapaprieta government. Anything else would endanger the cohesion of the ruling bloc. The presidential proscription of their leader brought the Radicals to the brink of departure from government. Understandably, the party initially refused to support Chapaprieta, and Gil-Robles had to use all his powers of persuasion to convince Lerroux to enter the new cabinet as foreign minister. As compensation for losing the premiership, the Radicals also gained two ministerial posts, but in conversations with the CEDA leader and Chapaprieta, Alcalá-Zamora did not hide his antipathy towards the supposedly dubious character of Lerroux’s closest associates and wished they had left office.
On 2 October, the president told the new prime minister informally of the existence of the Strauss file on the pretext of ‘asking advice’. The latter was stupefied that he had not been informed previously, as he would have refused power. Chapaprieta was well aware that Alcalá-Zamora wanted him to accept ‘the responsibility of dealing with the Strauss papers’. Since any formal presidential démarche would elevate the political significance of the affair, the prime minister advised him the following day to drop the matter discreetly. But this only encouraged the indefatigable head of state to leak indirectly details of the dossier to the public. In the first parliamentary debate on estraperlo, the monarchist Antonio Goicoechea announced that his followers had heard the allegations from ‘rumours’ spread by the ‘highest authorities’. When the Latin American press published still secret extracts of the file, Lerroux suspected the source to be the president’s press chief Emilio Herrero, a contributor to Prieto’s El Liberal who was also close to foreign correspondents. Alcalá-Zamora was not the only possible suspect. In order to avoid any nasty surprises, Lerroux secretly informed leading figures within his party of the dossier. During Chapaprieta’s investiture on 1 October, the Radical deputy Basilio Álvarez remarked that his leader’s new job was strange, as ‘if D[on] Alejandro Lerroux did not sin politically, why the demotion?’ In the same debate, the Agrarian Royo-Villanova criticised Alcalá-Zamora’s decision to appoint a new prime minister given that his predecessor continued to enjoy a parliamentary majority, and alluded to the moral opprobrium that monarchist statesmen Romero Robledo and Antonio Maura received in their day, quoting former Liberal prime minister Moret’s aphorism that ‘these accusations . . . are not made against people but against a regime’.12
In order to express the extent of their disgust with the president, the Radicals organised a public tribute to Lerroux in Madrid on 9 October and encouraged other parties to participate. Given that the new government was barely a week old, this was a foolish act that could only be interpreted as a direct attack on the president and risked turning him leftwards. Yet Lerroux agreed it should ahead. Not only did he want to demonstrate that his leadership of the party remained as strong as ever, but also that his former coalition partners had not deserted him. Nevertheless, he was aware of the risks and tried to convince Alcalá-Zamora that the occasion had little political significance. This was rather difficult to believe as Lerroux was flanked on the platform by the whole government, the speaker, and other centre-right leaders, as well as 180 deputies. Before such an impressive turnout, Gil-Robles declared that the maintenance of the ruling bloc was his primary political concern, and warned the president that any dissolution of the Cortes would be his last. He concluded by praising Lerroux’s capacity for self-sacrifice. In his reply, the Radical leader picked his words carefully except when he called for obedience to the ‘highest’ authorities, as they demanded ‘the utmost of respect’ not ‘for the men [who occupy these offices] but for the rule of law’. This was a distinction that he knew would trouble the querulous Alcalá-Zamora and sought to disguise the slight by raising a glass to the ‘Head of State . . . for the Republic and for Spain’. None of those who attended the event noticed the allusion and a relieved Chapaprieta telephoned Alcalá-Zamora to praise Lerroux’s restraint and professions of loyalty, and the president even called to congratulate his reluctant new foreign minister on the speech.13
This happy state of mind only lasted until Alcalá-Zamora read press accounts of Lerroux’s words. At the following day’s cabinet, he blasted Chapaprieta’s myopia and made ironic asides to Lerroux about Strauss, including a barbed comment that he will leave the presidency ‘with a clean conscience and with my head held high’. On 11 October, the head of state informed Chapaprieta that he could no longer withhold the dossier and wanted the government to act. On the prime minister’s request, Alcalá-Zamora told Gil-Robles and Martínez de Velasco the following day, and refused the CEDA leader’s entreaties to drop the matter. Confronted by presidential stubbornness, the prime minister and his two senior ministers decided to forward the dossier to the Supreme Court prosecutor without publicity. Ultimately, they did not want to be accused of covering up a scandal ‘uncovered’ by the president and committed under a minority Radical government in which they had not served.14
As Lerroux argued that he had nothing to hide, he not did object to the involvement of the Supreme Court but refused to countenance the resignation of those Radical ministers implicated in the dossier as this would be tantamount to an admission of guilt. But on 18 October, any lingering hope that the political damage could be contained disappeared. Chapaprieta and Gil Robles were alerted to moves to raise Strauss in parliament and it appeared likely that Azaña would mention estraperlo at a forthcoming mass meeting in Comillas. To avoid being implicated in the scandal, Gil-Robles issued a seemingly innocuous press release that only served to stoke the fires of speculation further. It did not prevent Azaña from making vailed references to Strauss in Comillas and failed to protect the Radicals’ allies from the rising political heat. The CEDA leader convinced Lerroux that the quickest way out of the crisis was for the Radicals to reaffirm their fitness for office and confront their critics in the Cortes. On 22 October, Pérez Madrigal, a party backbencher, called on the government to make a statement which prompted the opposition to demand a parliamentary commission of inquiry to determine political responsibilities. When the Lliga leader Cambó feared that Gil-Robles and Chapaprieta were prepared to succumb to this pressure, he rose from his seat to denounce what he regarded as an unconstitutional act that would subvert the separation of powers and turn the Cortes into a French Revolution style ‘Public Health Committee’. He then raised the ‘extremely malevolent precedent’ of the ‘responsibility commissions’ between 1931 and 1933, when parliament became judge and jury.15
In an attempt to avoid both a parliamentary investigation and a split with his coalition partners, Lerroux presented the allegations as a conspiracy of lies cooked up by a blackmailer in cahoots with the opposition. He read in parliament a letter written by Guzmán to Strauss that underlined Azaña’s interest in his grievances. However, his centre-right allies still voted for a parliamentary investigation; Gil Robles saw it as the best way to delineate responsibility and bring closure. As the CEDA leader did not want to hold the debate on the scandal along party lines, he chose not to press home the advantage that no current ministers – the only ones politically responsible to the Cortes – were involved or demand proof from Lerroux’s accusers. This was a great error: a partisan left/right scrap would have produced more heat than light, and the government could have used its majority to guillotine the debate by turning it into a vote of confidence. Had Chapaprieta then referred Strauss’ allegations to the courts, no one could have accused him of a cover-up.
Instead, the investigation began on 23 October and the Supreme Court prosecutor told to hand over the available documentation. As the prime minister observed, ‘bitterness’ and ‘passion’ characterised the attitude of the parliamentary commission, as ‘their partisan spirit raised [the political temperature] rather than reduced it’. Concluding their work in barely three days, investigators admitted that they could not prove that any crime had been committed, or even that estraperlo was illegal. But they had ‘the moral conviction’ that there existed ‘conduct and ways of operating that are not in tune with austere or ethical standards’. The parliamentary report provided a list of implicated individuals including two Radical deputies, Salazar Alonso and Sigfrido Blasco-Ibáñez, mid-level figures who had dealings with Strauss like Pich y Pon and Aurelio Lerroux as well as Eduardo Benzo and José Valdivia, the senior interior ministry officials who dealt with the estraperlo licence application. Yet investigators only questioned Salazar Alonso and Blasco-Ibáñez, and the report failed to explain precisely what they had done wrong. Nevertheless, after this political naming and shaming, the cabinet decided to disown the officials on the list just before the parliamentary debate of 28 October due to the ‘sensitive’ nature of their positions.16
That day the Radicals faced a political trial in the Cortes. The details of the Strauss case faded into the background as the party’s enemies voiced grievances that in some cases dated from the beginning of the century. ‘In two hours I lived a hundred years’, Lerroux remembered, as he tried to fend off the bitter attacks of his opponents. Although he expected an onslaught from the left, he was surprised and hurt by the interventions of José Antonio Primo de Rivera and the monarchists given his party’s role in securing amnesty for their association with the dictatorship. The significant exception was Calvo Sotelo, who identified Alcalá-Zamora as the cause of this parliamentary hullabaloo.
The humiliating climax was a secret vote on the Strauss report that cleared Salazar Alonso but condemned Blasco-Ibáñez. The Radicals left the chamber in protest when votes were subsequently held on implicated officials who could not defend themselves in parliament. When Aurelio Lerroux and Rocha (whose brother had carried out some legal work for Strauss) refused to leave their posts, the prime minister stepped in to force them out, appointing two other Radicals in their place.17
Only after the parliamentary trial came to end did the judges take over. On 2 November, the Supreme Court appointed Ildefonso Bellón as a special investigative magistrate. After his ‘meticulous enquiry’, he filed charges of fraud and bribery against Strauss and influence peddling and misfeasance against those officials who worked with him, including Lerroux’s nephew. Bellón stressed that these latter crimes were acts of intention, not commission, as the police closed the casinos immediately. The bribes, the magistrate concluded, consisted of two gold watches worth around 5,000 pesetas in total, but the invoices provided by Strauss did not reveal their recipients, and the dates of purchase – December 1934 – did not tally with his later statements. Furthermore, Aurelio Lerroux’s name did not appear on the game license for the Formentor Hotel and Bellón dismissed Strauss’ figures for the losses he sustained over estraperlo. He also accepted the validity of technical and legal police reports that recommended the legalisation of the game, and pointed to a demonstration of the roulette wheel that took place within the interior ministry. Bellón recorded the astonishment of the high officials who watched Strauss present his game, and Benzo asked how one could make money from it. The inventor replied that it was all about speed and the inevitable errors of judgement made by casino gamblers enjoying themselves. This differed to later reports about what actually happened in the casinos, as these suggested that the house always won. Bellón ruled that Strauss attempted to get a license for a game of skill when in reality he wanted to install a rigged roulette wheel. The case file emphasised that if was not for the swindle, estraperlo did not violate Spanish law, and established that ministerial approval had only been given for the game to be played in San Sebastian, not in Majorca. Bellón pointed to an unsigned document issued by Salazar Alonso on 25 August 1934 and another signed by Benzo authorising ‘a trial’ on condition that bets did not exceed five pesetas. Although the magistrate concluded that there was enough evidence for charges, the allegations were not serious enough to demand a secured bail bond for any of the defendants. For Bellón, the case was a ‘poor man’s Stravisky’, a reference to the far more significant financial scandal that rocked France in 1934.18
The political dust from the Strauss affair had not yet settled when the Tayá-Nombela scandal erupted. Antonio Tayá was a shipping agent known to Lerroux from his days in Barcelona as a Pi y Margall federalist. Tayá never joined the Radical Party and drifted away from politics to concentrate on his increasingly lucrative business activities after 1914. The Radical leader did not hear his name again until May 1935 when Guillermo Moreno, the prime minister’s principal private secretary, handed him a voluminous file containing Tayá’s claim for state compensation for his Africa Occidental maritime company. In 1926, the firm obtained the right to run the colonial shipping lines in the Gulf of Guinea, but the dictatorship cancelled the concession on two occasions in 1928–29 alleging breach of contract. Tayá claimed that the suspension of service and the consequent losses were due to the malicious actions of the colonial authorities who kept his ships in port and withheld promised subsidies in order to aid a competitor. After the Council of State, the supreme consultative council, argued against the rescission of contract, the Supreme Court concurred, adding in November 1930 that Tayá should receive compensation for the state aid that Africa Occidental did not receive. Yet less than a year later, the first payment of 500,000 pesetas was blocked on the orders of the new Provisional Government, and in February 1932, the republican-socialist coalition under Azaña once again annulled the contract. These decisions were made at the highest political level, as the relevant government department, the General Directorate of Morocco and the Colonies, reported directly to the prime minister’s office. After this fresh reverse, Tayá took his case back to the courts and the Supreme Court reversed the decision on 25 April 1935, ordering the complainant to be indemnified in full. Nevertheless, when the General Directorate of Morocco and the Colonies stalled on carrying out the sentence, an exasperated Tayá launched an appeal to the prime minister’s office less than a month later. Guillermo Moreno told Lerroux that Africa Occidental demanded seven million pesetas for unpaid subsidies between 1930 and 1935, but state lawyers were appealing against the figure. The principal private secretary advised the prime minister to commission an expert evaluation of the services provided by the company as the basis of a negotiation with Tayá in the hope that this would end the dispute with less cost to the government. With Moreno and Tayá’s friend the left-wing Federalist deputy Melchor Marial acting as intermediaries, Lerroux met Africa Occidental’s owner, who stressed his willingness to settle to avoid further financial pain in his ruinous legal battle with the state.19
After reading details of the case carefully, the prime minister sympathised with Tayá’s plight. He agreed with Moreno that the government should accept the Supreme Court’s ruling, adding that the contract be restored to Africa Occidental. To enable the company to meet its contractual obligations, a magistrate working with an accountant from the finance ministry determined the amount of unpaid subsidies between 1928 and 1935 to be three million pesetas, and stipulated that it come out of the Guinean colonial budget. This was less than half of Tayá’s claim, and it could have been the end of the matter, as the prime minister had the constitutional right to resolve this type of administrative dispute. But Lerroux recognised that Alcalá-Zamora was against paying any compensation, and the president had requested that no decision be made until the Council of State had pronounced on the settlement. The Radical leader was hardly an expert on administrative procedure, but he knew enough to grasp that was an attempt to torpedo the agreement, but once again, he decided to indulge Alcalá-Zamora in the vain hope of winning his favour. As feared, the Council of State’s pronouncement did muddy the waters as it stated that the government should not pay for services that it did not receive and specified that any compensation had to be based solely on losses suffered by the company. Moreno advised the prime minister to disregard this non-legally binding judgement, as the final bill could be even higher, but an undecided Lerroux created a ministerial committee under Chapaprieta, Gil-Robles and Royo-Villanova to make a final recommendation after taking the ruling to cabinet on 9 July.20
Senior officials within the General Directorate of Morocco and the Colonies were furious at the government’s willingness to come to terms with Tayá. Its inspector general, Antonio Nombela, and his secretary José Antonio de Castro accused Moreno of misleading the prime minister in order to profit personally from plundering the colonial budget. Tayá, in turn, accused these civil servants of disobeying the Supreme Court judgment of that April. Nombela and Castro were close political associates of Alcalá-Zamora, as the president had managed to place many of his friends within the colonial department in 1931. The change of government two years later did not harm their careers, as Samper promoted both men to the top of the General Directorate of Morocco and the Colonies as part of a general administrative reorganisation that only increased the influence of the head of state. After Lerroux’s return to power in October 1934, clashes between his prime ministerial office and the colonial department increased as the former sought to hive off the latter’s duties to a reconstituted overseas territories ministry that had been originally abolished in 1899. Underlying this administrative conflict was a power struggle between colonial officials and Radical post holders over the production of cocoa and coffee in Spanish Guinea, as well as the export of tropical timber and the concessions of public works and maritime transport contracts. What made this dispute politically serious was Alcalá-Zamora’s championing of his allies within the General Directorate of Morocco and the Colonies. He spuriously objected to a decree regulating the production and importation of cocoa from the neighbouring island colony of Fernando Poo, while sponsoring the unopposed appointment of Luis Sánchez-Guerra, the brother of his secretary Rafael, to the post of public works inspector general in Spanish Guinea. Thus the president’s attempt at empire building was frustrated by Lerroux after discovering that the colonial department had formulated a prohibitively expensive infrastructure plan for the West African colony without his knowledge or approval.21
Royo-Villanova was not involved in this turf war, and he was the only member of the cabinet committee to study the papers of the Tayá case. With the support of Gil-Robles and Chapaprieta, he reported to the cabinet on 11 July that Moreno had handled the matter competently. But as the subject came up at the end of the meeting, Luis Lucia, the minister taking the minutes, did not properly record the backing of the cabinet for the prime minister’s office. That did not seem to matter at the time, as Lerroux told Moreno to order the General Directorate of Morocco and the Colonies to pay Tayá. On 12 July, Nombela refused, and complained to Alcalá-Zamora, Lucia and Gil-Robles that the colonial budget was being fleeced. Moreno instructed Lucia to confirm in writing the cabinet agreement, but he refused, and to add to the political pressure Alcalá-Zamora called Lerroux to express his opposition while Gil-Robles demanded to look at the case file on 13 July. After the Radical leader handed it over and suspended the payment, the CEDA leader proposed in cabinet three days later that compensation should only be based on the Council of State’s judgement. At 3.2 million pesetas, this turned out to be more than the original settlement and Lerroux sacked Nombela and Castro, ordering the General Directorate of Morocco and the Colonies to pay up on 13 September.22
With the estraperlo scandal dominating the headlines, Nombela waited until 28 November to retaliate. That day he sent parliament a note – simultaneously published in the press – demanding that his ‘honour be restored’ by the revocation of his dismissal as inspector general. He not only accused Moreno of defrauding the public purse but claimed that Lerroux had acted illegally by compensating Tayá. Significantly, Federico Fernández Castillejo of Alcalá-Zamora’s Republican Progressive Party presented these allegations to the Cortes having accompanied Nombela to a meeting with Chapaprieta a fortnight earlier to demand a full parliamentary investigation. But after the earthquake of Strauss, the prime minister was not keen for Nombela’s campaign to gather momentum and proposed in cabinet on 28 November to send the former inspector general’s note to the political graveyard of the parliamentary petitions commission. This was rejected by Gil-Robles, as the CEDA leader was convinced that Nombela was out to get him and Lucia, and insisted that the Cortes look into the charges in further detail. As in the estraperlo imbroglio, Gil-Robles also called on Lerroux to anticipate the opposition and ask for a parliamentary commission; the Radical leader did so in the Cortes on the following day. Not all deputies were impressed. Breaking protocol, the former minister Royo-Villanova stood up to protest against a ruse designed ‘to cast further shadows on Mr. Lerroux’ at the cost of destroying parliamentary democracy:
Is Parliament going to be at the mercy of anyone who comes to bring us matters that are outside our competence? What is this about? [On one occasion] a foreign man, who one day instead of going to the Courts, goes to the President of the Republic and presents, in my judgement irregularly, an accusation. Now it is something more scandalous: a civil servant [comes] a few months after losing his position and who coincidentally . . . has lost all hope of getting it back . . . How can we, just because some man makes an allegation, paralyse the legislative work [of parliament] to nominate a Commission, just like last time?
He went on to suggest that the matter be dealt with by the parliamentary petitions commission as the government was already conducting an internal inquiry, and that any political responsibilities should be discussed on the floor of the Cortes. Having just left government, Royo-Villanova promised to take part in such a debate, as ‘I will answer for everything . . . that took place, and I will also respond for all those people . . . who continue to have confidence in Mr. Lerroux’.23
The former minister’s speech did not prevent a parliamentary investigation. On 7 December, this concluded that Lerroux was innocent and confirmed the dismissals of Nombela and Castro. Yet the enquiry heard evidence from Nombela without calling Tayá, and also ruled that Moreno had authorised the original payment to Tayá without cabinet authorisation on 11 July. The report pleased no one. Radical deputies rejected its findings of culpability with the support of the Liberal Democrats, the Lliga and the PNV. The left did not get a condemnation of the whole government, while monarchists were disappointed that Lerroux was off the hook. As if the situation was not chaotic enough, Lucia remarked in parliament that the agreement to pay Tayá had taken place at the end of cabinet ‘with the ministers about to leave the room’, which led to a vehement denial by Royo-Villanova. This was followed by an altercation in the corridors of parliament between Lucia and his fellow CEDA deputy and ex-justice minister Casanueva, who later apologised to Lerroux for the comments of his party colleague. This sorry spectacle provoked disgust among even seasoned observers of Spanish politics. As the centrist Ahora put it, ‘the average citizen will have their head in their hands [with bewilderment] as they recall the existence of magistrates’ courts, the complaints’ boxes in the Palace of Justice [and] administrative investigations; he will suspect that all that is immaterial when Congress of Deputies . . . can intervene and be judge and jury’.24
The fact that parliament eventually confirmed the Nombela report did not help Lerroux. The debate ended on 8 December with a resounding victory for the opposition. They managed to present the affair as one of fraud exposed by an honourable civil servant. With an increasingly pessimistic Radical leader believing that the centre-right bloc would split over the issue, he instructed his parliamentary spokesman Rafael Guerra del Rio not to hold up the vote on a symbolic motion of censure against the former prime minister and Moreno. Lerroux himself had decided not to participate from the government bench and went home on the evening of 7 December. His withdrawal prompted dismay among his coalition partners and many within his party, who pleaded with him to return to stave off defeat. Lerroux presented his decision to leave parliament before the end of the debate as an act of dignity in the face of unmerited criticism. His disconcerted followers saw it as a confession of defeat. The Radical leader’s action was comprehensible: the Nombela allegations were a deliberate attempt to destroy his reputation by inflating an insignificant issue into a major case of corruption. But a parliamentary speech which would have exposed the hollow nature of the accusations against him and rallied the government’s supporters could have limited the damage to his leadership and his party.25
Alcalá-Zamora Commits Political Suicide
The parliamentary humiliation of the Radical Party brought to an end Chapaprieta’s brief spell as prime minister. The negotiations to find his successor were more tortured than usual due to Alcalá-Zamora, as the president’s determination to end Gil-Robles’ tenure as war minister ended the possibility of a Martínez de Velasco administration. With Lerroux banished to political purgatory, the former prime minister blessed the deal agreed by the speaker Santiago Alba and the CEDA leader to support each other if either was called to the presidential palace. But Alcalá-Zamora was no longer interested in prolonging the life of the present parliament. He was looking for a dissolution, and offered Miguel Maura and Portela Valladares the opportunity of jointly wielding power. This was madness; apart from a mutual antipathy, the two men could barely muster ten deputies between them. After this move failed with a break in relations between Maura and the president, the latter turned exclusively to Portela, suspended the parliamentary session and announced that his new government would organise fresh elections. The prospect of a national poll broke the unity of the former centre-right bloc as the smaller parties – the Lliga, Agrarians and the Liberal-Democrats – agreed to serve Portela alongside Chapaprieta. They followed the logic that if a dissolution was inevitable, it was better that the left did not have the opportunity to call elections. Portela was under strict instructions from the president not to ask the Radical Party or the CEDA to join the government; in any case, neither organisation was prepared to offer ministers. When Radicals Manuel Becerra and Joaquín de Pablo-Blanco agreed to accept office under Portela, they had to leave the party.
The Portela government was a key marker in Alcalá-Zamora’s strategy to establish a new centrist political force on the ruins of the Radical Party. From April 1935, he had dreamed of having the loyalty of a large bloc of deputies who would underwrite his political activism. Even if another election did not win a majority for his centre party, it would alter the parliamentary arithmetic enough to permit the unrestricted exercise of his presidential powers until his term expired in December 1937. It would also provide the platform for his return to front-line politics. There is little doubt that Alcalá-Zamora used the two scandals to further his ambitions and break the unity of the ruling centre-right coalition in the autumn of 1935. Despite being cast into the political wilderness, Lerroux continued to be the main obstacle to the president’s pet project and Portela used every trick in the governmental book to weaken the former prime minister’s hold over the Radical Party. Struggling to come to terms with Strauss and Nombela, the veteran republican witnessed how Portela dangled the fruits of power in the faces of demoralised Radical deputies who feared that a rapid return to government was impossible due to the now toxic reputation of its leader.26
Lerroux refused to wave the white flag of surrender. He did not consider retirement just yet. That November he published a detailed plan to reactivate the stalled process of internal party reform, and just before Christmas the Radicals held a special congress that reaffirmed Lerroux’s leadership, while granting Santiago Alba a prominent place in the projected reorganisation, a clear sign that he was being groomed for the succession. Delegates also confirmed the alliance with the CEDA. Although in trouble, it was still assumed that the Radicals had a future in Spanish politics; the party would remain an essential part of any future centre-right majority government. By the beginning of 1936, Lerroux had successfully contained the attempts by Portela to steal the party’s best talents as only twelve accepted government jobs, leaving the Radicals with a parliamentary grouping still in excess of sixty.27
As December progressed, Alcalá-Zamora’s hopes of a realignment within the centre-right looked doomed to failure. The minor parties within the Portela government were not prepared to come together within a new centrist grouping, let alone fight an election against their old Radical and CEDA allies. Cambó and Chapaprieta hoped that Portela would reconstruct a broad centre-right coalition as the government faced the real prospect of a broad electoral pact between leftist parties that included communists as well as left republicans and socialists. It was political suicide to run alone as the voting system awarded 75–80% of the seats to the winning slate in multi-member constituencies. This was a dilemma of Alcalá-Zamora and Portela’s making as the sudden closure of parliament prevented an electoral reform bill from reaching the statute book. Lerroux drew up the legislation during his final government after closely consulting his centre-right partners. Reflecting his great political experience, it proposed reducing the scale of victory for the victors, eliminating electoral thresholds and the second round, and reducing the size of constituencies with more than ten members, as it was in these districts where the results were least proportional to the votes cast. Had these changes been introduced in time for the crucial elections the following February, the final composition of the Cortes would have better reflected the close outcome of the poll.
In December 1935, Portela did not foresee the consequences of the failure of electoral reform as no one within the government wanted to go to the country immediately. But as Alcalá-Zamora did also not want his prime minister to work with the CEDA or reopen parliament, the smaller parties began to peel away from the administration. Soon Portela’s cabinet only consisted of friends and cronies of the president. In order to avoid submitting his government to a parliamentary vote of confidence that would surely be lost, the prime minister obtained the president’s approval to call fresh election. ‘Nothing is less parliamentary’, wrote Lerroux, ‘nothing less politically dishonest, electorally less honourable or more risky than that decision’.28
The electoral campaign began on 7 January 1936 in circumstances that did not favour the centre-right generally or the Radicals in particular. Quite apart from a predictable dip in popularity after over two years in government, they faced an electorate tired of the suspension of constitutional guarantees following the October 1934 revolution. The green shoots of economic recovery had yet to translate into a fall in unemployment, and Chapaprieta’s austerity measures provoked fierce protests from civil servants. To make things worse for Lerroux, the Strauss and Nombela scandals made him an easy target for his enemies and the Radicals a less attractive electoral partner for other centre-right parties. The dissolution of parliament ended the former prime minister’s hopes for party reform, and open conflict erupted within the Radicals’ provincial organisations during the selection of candidates. Lerroux’s late intervention could not compensate for Alba’s lack of authority, and some of those who lost out in internal squabbles joined the depleted ranks of Portela’s centre party. Those who remained had to fight an election in which their leader was not just a ‘traitor’ for the left, but also ‘the executor of the Spanish proletariat’ responsible for ‘drowning in blood’ the 1934 revolution. It was evident that for Lerroux and his former ministers at stake was not just their seats but also their freedom, as the Popular Front promised to hold to account those ‘criminally responsible’ for the ‘repression’.29
The Radical leader therefore had no doubt that the Radicals should contest the election alongside those in government during the October insurrection: the CEDA, Agrarians, Liberal Democrats and the Lliga. As no vote could be lost in the battle to prevent a Popular Front victory, Lerroux obtained the approval of his national committee to enter electoral pacts with the monarchists, despite their generally hostile reaction to the Strauss and Nombela scandals. Predictably, a weakened Radical Party encountered more difficulty making agreements with other parties than in previous elections when they were in government. Conscious of his damaged reputation, Lerroux delegated the task to enter the Anti-revolutionary Bloc to Alba, but this only suggested to conservatives that the republican’s long political life was finally ending. Complicating matters further was the CEDA’s decision to negotiate pacts with Portela in fifteen leftist strongholds at the expense of the Radicals. Lerroux thought it an error for Gil-Robles to underestimate the value of his party as a partner, while negotiating with those who had little chance of success. He also criticised his former minister’s efforts to maximise the number of CEDA candidates within the Anti-Revolutionary bloc in order to dominate the next parliament, stressing that as the left-wing of the electoral coalition, the Radicals could attract republican voters hostile to both the Popular Front and the Catholic right.
In the end, in the Radicals reached agreement with the CEDA in 18 out of the 60 multi-member constituencies. Lerroux had 23 candidates within the Anti-revolutionary Bloc and 44 others fighting alone with a negligible chance of victory. Pre-poll forecasts suggested that the Radicals would not win more than twenty seats. Lerroux himself stood for Castellon, where the party won in 1933, and for insurance accepted an offer from Cambó to be included in the Barcelona slate of the Catalan Front for Order. So, in what would be his last ever election, the old man returned to the city where he first tasted political success, although his mission was very different to that of 1901: he had to convince his voters to go conservative.30
The outlook for the Radicals was as gloomy as the prospects for Spanish democracy. Lerroux thought that even if the centre-right won, there would be a merciless struggle to the death between revolutionaries and anti-revolutionaries. The country faced a ‘problem, which is not the nature of its [political] regime, but whether it would exist at all’. Even a normally circumspect Alba gloomily noted that there was no longer a ‘middle way’. The Radicals’ campaign combined its defence of a liberal parliamentary Republic with anti-revolutionary rhetoric. In Barcelona, Lerroux explained that his alliance with the CEDA and moderate republicans was consistent with ‘a vision of civilisation that has property and family as its base’. He did not apologise for working with the Catholic right, as he preferred a ‘liberal and Christian Republic to a demagogic and communist Republic’. The Radicals were continuing in their task of building a grand ‘liberal and conservative . . . republican bloc’ that would prevent the victory of the revolutionaries of 1934, the ‘moral and material ruin’ of Spain, ‘the renunciation of all feelings of humanity’, ‘the most awful barbarism’ and even ‘our very own existence as individuals’. The Radical leader and his followers went to vote on 16 February 1936 convinced that their futures were on the line.31
The February 1936 Election
For Lerroux, the early hours of 17 February were as bitter as his triumphs in the 1931 and 1933 elections were sweet. As the first results came in, it became obvious that he had failed to be elected for Barcelona. In Castellon, the CEDA and the Popular Front relegated him to third place, but at least the Radical leader had garnered enough votes to force a second round. He was unaware of how exactly his party was doing nationally, but it seemed evident that most of those candidates who stood as part of the Anti-revolutionary Bloc had a good chance of success. But soon the count descended into chaos. As the polls closed on 16 February, unorganised groups of Popular Front supporters illegally began to congregate around the counting centres. Ostensibly celebrating the increasingly clear triumphs of the left in urban areas that placed the Popular Front in the lead, they jumped the gun to proclaim victory a few hours later. Consequently, jubilation turned into demands for the immediate release of revolutionaries from prison as well as control of local councils. By the afternoon of 17 February, leftist crowds called for Popular Front leaders to take power. With declarations still pending in many areas, these increasingly violent demonstrations posed a threat not just to public order but also to the integrity of the final election result itself. Portela, who was interior minister as well as head of government, faced the difficult if necessary prospect of forcibly dispersing the supporters of those who could be in government within weeks.
On the morning of the 17th, the Portela government decided to declare a state of war [estado de guerra] to take back control of the streets and ensure the peaceful completion of the count. However, Alcalá-Zamora forced the prime minister to declare a state of alarm [estado de alarma], which meant that Portela, and not the army, remained responsible for preserving order. This prompted repeated attempts by the prime minister to resign, but the president held firm and it appeared that Portela would remain in office until the official declaration of the result on 20 February. But further street violence led the prime minister to desert his post 24 hours earlier. This left the government leaderless at a critical juncture in Spain’s history, and Lerroux – like most Spaniards – decried Portela’s ‘flight’ or ‘bunk’. The Radical leader attributed the prime minister’s decision to the electoral failure of his candidates, but correctly pointed out that he had to remain in office temporarily until the situation had been clarified and public safety guaranteed. Not even Portela’s most fervent supporters, Lerroux averred, ‘can find arguments to defend his actions’, and took pride in his very different reaction to the October 1934 revolt.32
The Radical leader was as surprised as everyone else by the strong performance of the Popular Front which left the election result on a knife-edge when Portela abandoned office on the morning of 19 February. Still, he suspected that later declarations in traditionally conservative areas would favour the Anti-revolutionary Bloc. This did not spare Gil-Robles of criticism. The Radical leader argued that the inability to turn votes into seats was due to the CEDA leader’s partisan approach in the pre-election negotiations, ‘overconfidence’ and ‘excessive arrogance’ that undermined the cohesion of the Anti-revolutionary Bloc, also claiming that the ‘right should not have vacillated, haggled on candidates, and dismissed cooperation’. The outcome was uncertainty until the second round. As a shrewd electoral operator, Lerroux knew that in very close contests, not even the official declaration was definitive since ‘electoral reruns can influence, sometimes decisively [like in February 1936] the composition of the [parliamentary] Chamber’. Moreover, ‘it would be very different indeed’ if these contests ‘took place under a different government to that which organised the general election’.
The former prime minister was pointing to Alcalá-Zamora’s decision to ask Azaña to replace Portela. In the mind of the Radical leader, this only facilitated the ‘dubious and disputable’ victory of the Popular Front. He argued strenuously against it when asked by the president during the normal round of consultations, asserting that a new government could not be formed in the middle of an election count with the outcome still uncertain. Instead, he pressed the president to exercise boldly his constitutional powers until the crisis was over. Lerroux would never understand why in that ‘most critical hour’ he gave the premiership to a left republican whom he did not trust and who had scorned the rule of law by fighting the election with the leaders of a rebellion. Gil-Robles had been denied the opportunity to govern for much less. The Radical leader maintained that rather than choose Azaña, Alcalá-Zamora should have selected a respected political figure who would have completed the election count impartially, contained the ‘avaricious avalanche of the Popular Front’ and resisted ‘the inevitable outbursts that were taking place in the streets’. If that meant provoking the revolutionary general strike threatened by the extreme left if the Popular Front were denied power, then at least the rebels would have confronted ‘a legitimately constituted power’. These were serious accusations, but Lerroux did not appreciate the desperate political straits that Alcalá-Zamora found himself in after Portela’s sudden departure. All of his political friends were already in the cabinet, and none of them was willing to take power in those desperate circumstances except the military men.33
The Azaña government took office on the afternoon of 19 February. For the next few days, Lerroux received reports concerning ‘the most elemental and shameless ploys’ undertaken by the new authorities to ‘force the scrutineers [of the count]’ in several key provinces to produce ‘a falsified parliamentary majority’ for the Popular Front. The Radicals were convinced that leftist chicanery denied them four out of the eight seats that they believed were theirs in the first round. Another three seats were later lost following a ruling by the leftist dominated parliamentary electoral commission. Without these irregularities, Lerroux complained, ‘any parliamentary majority would have been in doubt . . . or precarious’ for anyone claiming victory. Certainly, Azaña’s accession to power eliminated any possibility of ‘the legitimate triumph of those candidates of the republican electoral coalition hostile to the Popular Front’. It was little comfort that Radical voters generally supported Lerroux’s anti-revolutionary stance. In 51 of the 57 constituencies where comparisons can be made, they all or mainly voted for centre-right electoral slates, which won 700,000 more votes than in 1933.34
The End of the Democratic Republic
Out of parliament, Lerroux could only observe the last months of the Republic as a privileged outsider. Refusing to leave politics, he spent his time trying to rebuild the Radical Party in grim times. This is not to suggest that the disappearance of the longest surviving republican party was inevitable; the left republicans had suffered a similarly catastrophic defeat in 1933 and were now back in government. The main problem was that the Radicals (together with the CEDA), were the main targets of leftist violence that disrupted their legal political activities after 19 February. To make matters worse, the Azaña government overturned Radical majorities on local councils; political reprisals combined with the lack of income meant that any recovery remained a chimera.
Far from staging a remarkable political comeback, Lerroux soon found that his own life was in danger. As the bête noire of socialists and communists, the Radical leader had to endure regular demonstrations outside his home with protesters chanting ‘Lerroux Must Die!’ and waving placards graphically depicting his funeral. On 13 March, the police intervened to prevent arsonists from firing his home. In this context, it is tempting to regard leftist demands for Lerroux’s imprisonment as a positive step to ensure his safety.35 In any case, the government seemed to worry less about what leftist vigilantes could do to Lerroux than what the old man could do to its hold on power as the interior ministry disregarded the former prime ministers’ protests to change his police escort in order to keep a better eye on his movements. The left also humiliated Lerroux in other, more petty, ways. These included Popular Front local councils withdrawing the honours granted to him by previous centre-right administrations. Concerned friends and party colleagues urged him to leave Madrid, but Lerroux was determined to stay put and face any criminal investigation that Popular Front leaders had promised former ministers involved in the suppression of the October 1934 insurrection.
Nevertheless, the Radical leader’s zeal for the political fight much diminished following a car accident during a drive back to Madrid from San Rafael on 15 May. Lerroux was still recovering at home when he heard rumours of a military uprising. He could not contain his scepticism given memories of Sanjurjo’s foolish escapade in August 1932, but stressed that he would never conspire ‘as long as republican legality remained in place’. This did not signify any change of attitude towards the left republican government, as ‘we are suffering a more or less disguised Dictatorship’ whose acts of constitutional vandalism included ‘the illegal dismissal’ of his long-time rival Alcalá-Zamora from the presidency. Lerroux pleaded with his supporters to ‘remain united’ and ‘have nothing to do with fascism [and] falangism’ because ‘salvation’ lay with ‘the law and freedom’. Only if the Popular Front intended to abolish democracy would the Radicals cooperate with a rebellion to restore ‘the rule of law’ and ‘legality’.36