On 15th January 1936, Manuel
Azaña helped
to establish a coalition
of parties on the political left to fight the national elections
due to take place the following month. This included the Socialist
Party (PSOE), Communist Party (PCE)
and the Republican Union Party.
The Popular
Front, as the coalition became known, advocated the restoration
of Catalan autonomy, amnesty for political prisoners, agrarian reform,
an end to political blacklists and the payment of damages for property
owners who suffered during the revolt of 1934. The Anarchists
refused to support the coalition and instead urged people not to vote.
Right-wing groups in Spain
formed the National Front. This included the CEDA
and the Carlists. The Falange
Española did not officially join but most of its members
supported the aims of the National Front.
The Spanish people voted
on Sunday, 16th February, 1936. Out of a possible 13.5 million voters,
over 9,870,000 participated in the election. 4,654,116 people (34.3)
voted for the Popular Front, whereas the National Front obtained 4,503,505
(33.2) and the centre parties got 526,615 (5.4). The Popular Front,
with 263 seats out of the 473 in the Cortes
formed the new government.
| Party |
Seats
in Cortes |
| CEDA |
101 |
| Socialists |
88 |
| Republican
Left |
79 |
| Republican
Union |
34 |
| Esquerra |
22 |
| Centre
Party |
21 |
| Carlists |
15 |
| Communists |
14 |
| Monarchists |
13 |
| Lliga |
12 |
| Agrarians |
11 |
| Radicals |
9 |
| Basques |
5 |
| Falangists |
0 |
(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.
(2)
Roy Campbell, Light on a Dark Horse
(1951)
One noticed, during the restless period that
preceded the 1936 elections, that the working class was divided in
two.
The bootblacks, an enormous class to themselves in Spain, the waiters,
and most of the mechanics, along with the miners and factory workers,
were either anarchists or Reds. It was expected that the anarchists
would abstain from voting: or might even vote for the Right, with
whom, in their liking for liberty, they have more in common than with
the Communists. Amongst the anarchists were to be found some of the
most generous idealistic people, at the same time as the real "phonys"
- like the ones that dug up the cemetery in Huesca,
held parades of naked nuns, and out-babooned in atrocity anything
I had ever read of before. But they were warm-blooded - unlike their
ice-cold compéres, the "commies", who were less human.
You could beg your life from an anarchist. It was not long before
most of the anarchists wished they had gone Right for they were unmercifully
massacred by their Red Comrades.
Hostilities broke out between Anarchists and
other Republicans simultaneously with their persecution of Christians,
Royalists, and Nationalists. That was one of the typical paradoxes
of Spanish history during the last twenty years. It was because I
saw this fission, so often, at first-hand, on the spot, that I knew
and said, repeatedly, and without ever hypocritically turning in my
tracks, that the mutual loathing of the various factions of "republicans"
would eventually preponderate over their hostility to the common adversary,
and the so called "loyalists" would collapse on account
of mutual disloyalty.
When the elections had
come and I had been hauled into a lorry on the road to Getafe with
a dead man's ticket and a shot gun at my kidneys, to vote Red, I took
it as a joke: but shortly after, I began to see red, too. Except under
compulsion, I had never voted in my life, and now I have twice seen
a majority of Red members get in on a minority vote - I have lost
all faith in that sort of thing. Voting has become obsolete since
(as in England) the minority usually wins most seats. I had been persuading
my wife and kids to leave Toledo, but it seemed the civil war would
never reach us from Madrid, in spite of a Red Mayor, since the Province
was loyal to Spain, in spite of unpunished murders. The wicked are
always the first to act and the good are slow.
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