The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933-1936 by Stanley G. Payne

Author:Stanley G. Payne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2006-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The Left Consolidates Power MARCH-MAY 1936

THE POPULAR FRONT PROGRAM pledged a policy of “Republicanization” of state personnel and administration, but exactly how far this would go was not clear. Whereas some historians have described Azaña’s program in 1936 as restoration of the policies of 1931-1933, he himself had said that it would be “in no way” (de ninguna manera) like that of the first biennium.1 Whereas in 1930 he had said that liberalism must be “radical” and “sectarian” in order to succeed, by 1936 the Republican left was adopting a position yet more radical and sectarian than three years earlier, though the Popular Front program specified that left Republicans did not accept economic socialism. Exactly how a minority left Republican government could function, depending on the support of revolutionaries, was at no point seriously discussed, for the revolutionaries had made it clear that they did not accept the Popular Front program itself as a long-term basis for government, but only as a stage in the enhancement of their own power. While the left Republicans spoke of Republicanization, and their revolutionary allies of preparing for revolutionary dictatorship, any discourse of democracy or equal rights disappeared.

It was clear that the new Azaña administration would be both more interventionist and more radical than the earlier government. If the most important factor here was the pressure of the worker parties, this also suited the leftward turn taken with the official formation of Izquierda Republicana in 1934, distinctly more statist and interventionist than its predecessor, Acción Republicana. One obvious target might be unemployment, which, according to official statistics, continued to worsen. Though the economy generally was recovering during 1935-36, the recovery had not yet affected the number out of work, which stood at 843,872 by the end of February 1936.2 That figure amounted to nearly 9 percent of the active population. It probably did not reflect all the hidden unemployment in the countryside, but did include the partially employed, so that it may have exaggerated absolute unemployment in the cities. Moreover, in parts of the south names of workers were sometimes not removed from the unemployment file after they had found employment, in order to retain maximal state support. The first major step in this area taken by the government was its law of mandatory reinstatement of workers who had been fired for political reasons. This went beyond the original Popular Front program, which had only specified rehiring state employees.

Tensions were keenest in the countryside. The winter of the Popular Front victory was extremely rainy, the second wettest of the century to that point, resulting in heavy farm losses and increased rural unemployment. Whereas urban unemployment was not remarkable and in the past year had increased by little more than 5 percent, in some rural areas unemployment had increased by more than 20 percent. Living standards had not fallen overall, for the incipient recovery had produced a slight increase in consumption under the center-right government, but the continued increase in unemployment, coinciding with the

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