A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. Paul Preston
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proletarian flavour that he wanted, Largo Caballero would insist on their presence. In this way, the Communists found a place in an electoral front which, contrary to rightist propaganda, was not, in Spain, a Comintern creation but the revival of the 1931 Republican-Socialist coalition. The left and centre left closed ranks on the basis of a programme of amnesty for prisoners, of basic social and educational reform and trade union freedom.
When a combination of Gil Robles’ tactic of erosion of successive cabinets and the revelation of two massive scandals involving followers of Lerroux led to the collapse of the Radicals, the CEDA leader assumed that he would be asked to form a government. Alcalá Zamora, however, had no faith in the CEDA leader’s democratic convictions. After all, only some weeks previously, Gil Robles’s youthful followers of the JAP had starkly revealed the aims of the legalist tactic in terms which called to mind the attitude of Goebbels to the 1933 elections in Germany: ‘with the weapons of suffrage and democracy, Spain must prepare itself to bury once and for all the rotting corpse of liberalism. The JAP does not believe in parliamentarism, nor in democracy’. It is indicative of Alcalá Zamora’s suspicion of Gil Robles that, throughout the subsequent political crisis, he had the Ministry of War surrounded by Civil Guards and the principal garrisons and airports placed under special vigilance. Gil Robles was outraged and in desperation, he investigated the possibilities of staging a coup d’état. The Generals that he approached, Fanjul, Goded, Varela and Franco, felt that, in the light of the strength of working class resistance during the Asturian events, the Army was not yet ready for a coup.
Elections were announced for February. Unsurprisingly, the election campaign was fought in a frenetic atmosphere. Already, in late October, Gil Robles had requested a complete range of Nazi anti-Marxist propaganda pamphlets and posters, to be used as a model for CEDA publicity material. In practical terms, the right enjoyed an enormous advantage over the left. Rightist electoral finance dramatically exceeded the exiguous funds of the left. Ten thousand posters and 50 million leaflets were printed for the CEDA. They presented the elections in terms of a life-or-death struggle between good and evil, survival and destruction. The Popular Front based its campaign on the threat of fascism, the dangers facing the Republic and the need for an amnesty for the prisoners of October. The elections held on 16 February resulted in a narrow victory for the Popular Front in terms of votes, but a massive triumph in terms of power in the Cortes.
The left had won despite the expenditure of vast sums of money – in terms of the amounts of money spent on propaganda, a vote for the right cost more than five times one for the left. Moreover, all the traditional devices of electoral chicanery had been used on behalf of the right. Because the election results represented an unequivocal statement of the popular will, they were taken by many on the right as proving the futility of legalism and ‘accidentalism’. The savagery of rightist behaviour during the last two years, henceforth known as bienio negro (black two years) ensured that the left’s tactical error of 1933 was unlikely to be repeated. The hour of the ‘catastrophists’ had struck. The CEDA’s youth sections and many of the movement’s wealthy backers were immediately convinced of the necessity of securing by violence what was unobtainable by persuasion. The elections marked the culmination of the CEDA attempt to use democracy against itself. This meant that henceforth the right would be more concerned with destroying the Republic than with taking it over. Military plotting began in earnest.
There was an almost instant return to the rural lock-out of 1933 and a new aggression from industrialists. The rural and industrial working classes were equally militant, determined to secure some redress for the anti-union repression of the bienio negro. Helpless in the midst of the conflict stood the government, weak and paralysed. Indeed, the central factor in the spring of 1936 was the fatal weakness of the Popular Front cabinet. The weakness was born not just of right-wing hostility but even more of the fact that it was in no meaningful sense representative of the electoral coalition which had voted it into power. In turn, that was the consequence of the ambiguity of PSOE attitudes to the Republic in the wake of the disappointments of 1931–33 and the suffering of the bienio negro. While Prieto was convinced that the situation demanded Socialist collaboration in government, Largo Caballero, fearful of a rank-and-file drift to the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, insisted that the liberal republicans govern alone. He fondly believed that the Republicans should carry out the Popular Front electoral programme until they reached their bourgeois limitations. Then, in his fanciful scenario, they would be obliged to make way for an all-Socialist government. He used his immense influence to prevent the participation in the government of the more realistic Prieto. In consequence, only Republicans sat in the Cabinet.
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