The Confederatión
Espanola de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA) in Spain
was founded by José Maria Gil Robles
on 28th February, 1933 out of a collection of small right-wing parties
opposed to the policies of Manuel
Azaña and
his Republican government.
In
the 1933 elections, the CEDA won the most seats in the Cortes.
President Niceto
Alcalá Zamora refused
to ask its leader, José Maria Gil Robles,
to form a government. However, seven members of the CEDA served as
ministers during the next three years.
In the elections of February
1936, 34.3 per cent of the vote went to the Popular
Front, 33.2 per cent to the conservative parties and the rest
to regional and centre parties. This gave the Popular Front 271 seats
out of the 448 in the Cortes
and Manuel
Azaña
was asked to form a new government.
The new government immediately
upset the conservatives by realizing all left-wing political prisoners.
The government also introduced agrarian reforms that penalized the
landed aristocracy. Other measures included transferring right-wing
military leaders such as Francisco
Franco to posts
outside Spain, outlawing the Falange Española
and granting Catalonia political and administrative autonomy.
On
the 10th May 1936 the conservative Niceto
Alcala Zamora was
ousted as president and replaced by the left-wing Manuel
Azaña.
Soon afterwards Spanish Army officers, including Emilio
Mola,
Francisco
Franco and José
Sanjurjo,
began plotting to overthrow the Popular Front
government. This resulted in the outbreak of the Spanish
Civil War on 17th July, 1936.
Most members of CEDA supported
the Nationalist
Army in the war.
However, General Franco was determined not to have competing right-wing
parties in Spain and in April 1937 CEDA was dissolved.
(1)
Charlotte
Haldane
visited Spain
with John
Haldane
in 1933. Charlotte later wrote
about their experiences in her autobiography,
Truth Will Out (1949)
The
poverty was tragic. It was bad in Cordoba, worse in Granada, almost
universal in Seville. Everywhere was economic, mental and physical
depression. There was a lot of local opposition to the Republic, led
and organized by the Church. The Government's natural idealistic incompetence
was encouraged by systematic sabotage of every project attempted.
The male working population was almost unanimously anarchist. The
CNT and particularly the FAI were the strongest revolutionary parties.
Socialism and Communism, or rather the Trotskyist deviation from that
political creed, were in the minority. But almost the entire female
population was firmly attached to Church politics, under the spiritual
and political domination of the priesthood. Underneath all the beauty
and glamour of the landscape, the architecture, the tradition, the
romance, were rumblings of the political earthquake to come.
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