2 - From Revolutionary Insurrection to Popular Front

Summary

The impact of the revolutionary insurrection was profound. In Asturias, the revolutionaries had seized control of most of a province, and a military campaign of more than two weeks was required to defeat them. From this point, polarization increased, and some historians have referred to the insurrection either as the “prelude to” or “first battle” of the eventual civil war. Nonetheless, the democratic Republic remained intact, and there was still opportunity to overcome, or at least palliate, the deepening polarization.

Almost all the new polities established in Europe after 1919 featured multiparty systems, but the Spanish Republic was unique in producing three successive drastic shifts in government within less than five years, making continuity very difficult and encouraging radicalization. Yet more unique was the absence of any coherent hegemonic force of the sort that, for good or ill, resolved crises in other countries. The Republic was unable to produce any kind of viable majority coalition, a dominant nationalist movement, a major hegemonic party, or even a temporary authoritarian government capable of enforcing its will.

For nearly a year, from October 1934 to September 1935, Spain was governed by a CEDA-Radical coalition. Whereas the initial biennium of 1931–33 had been a time of advanced, sometimes radical, reformism, the second phase under the Radicals in 1933–34 was a period of balanced administration from the center. The government that Lerroux led in the third phase from 1934 to 1935 was a center-right coalition that moved in a much more conservative direction, revising or canceling a number of the earlier reforms and abruptly reversing most of the limited agrarian reform. In one sense, this was a normal development in a representative political system in which different electoral results may lead to different policies, but according to the left, it was the beginning of “fascism.”