The Popular Front
When the new head of government, Manuel Portela Valladares, summoned the council of ministers on 1 January 1936 he already had in his hands the decree to dissolve the Cortes. New elections were to be announced for 16 February. They were to be the last free elections held in Spain for forty years.
The decree was finally published on 7 January and the electoral campaign rapidly became heated. The results of the previous election had underlined the way the law gave such a favourable weighting to political coalitions. This encouragement to both the left and the right to create alliances had the effect of emptying the centre ground.
Any possibility of compromise had been destroyed by the revolutionary uprising of the left and its cruel repression by the army and Civil Guard. The depth of feeling was too strong on either side to allow democracy to work. Both sides used apocalyptic language, funnelling the expectations of their followers towards a violent outcome, not a political one. Largo Caballero declared, ‘If the right win the elections, we will have to go straight to open civil war.’1 Not surprisingly, the right reacted with a similar attitude. In their view a left-wing victory in the polls was bound to lead to violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat which Largo Caballero had promised.
The main group on the right was basically an alliance of the CEDA with monarchists and Carlists of the National Block. José María Gil Robles, the CEDA leader, called it ‘the national counter-revolutionary front’.2 Gil Robles, whose Catholic corporatism had acquired some superficial fascist trappings, allowed himself to be acclaimed by his followers at mass meetings as the leader, with the cry ‘Jefe, jefe, jefe!’. (The Spanish for ‘chief’ was an amateurish imitation of ‘Duce!’ or ‘Führer!’.) His advertising for the campaign included a massive poster covering the façade of a building in central Madrid with the slogan: ‘Give me an absolute majority and I will give you a great Spain.’ Millions of leaflets were distributed saying that a victory for the left would produce ‘an arming of the mob, the burning of banks and private houses, the division of property and land, looting and the sharing out of your women’.3 The finance for such a campaign came from landowners, large companies and the Catholic Church, which hurried to bless the alliance with the idea that a vote for the right was a vote for Christ.
Since the proclamation of the Republic in April 1931, with the subsequent burning of churches and convents and the anti-clerical provisions in the Constitution, the Catholic hierarchy had already demonstrated its hostility. But the rising of October 1934 had pushed it into advocating disobedience to a legally constituted government if it were necessary to protect the interests of the Church. When the Republic suppressed the state subsidy the Church had soon found itself impoverished, and its priests depended even more on contributions from their parishioners.4
In 1936 Spain had some 30,000 priests, most of whom were poor and very uneducated, incapable of any other employment. The hierarchy, however, was jealous of its privileges. When Cardinal Vidal y Barraquer, faced with the Church’s financial crisis, proposed that the richer dioceses should help the poorer ones, most of the bishops objected furiously.5
On 15 January 1936 the parties of the centre-left and left signed a pact to contest the elections as a single group.6 A Popular Front programme was drafted, concentrating mainly on agrarian reform, the re-establishment of the Catalan statute of autonomy and an amnesty for the prisoners in Spain arrested after the October revolution.7 Nothing was said about nationalization of banks or division of the land, but the right claimed that there were secret clauses in the pact.8 This was a natural suspicion in the circumstances. The Popular Front election manifesto was indeed mild, yet the caballeristas had already called for the nationalization of the land, the dissolution of the army, Civil Guard and all religious orders with seizure of their property. In May 1935 the manifesto of the Alianza Obrera had called in addition for ‘confiscation and nationalization of large industry, finance, transportation and communications’.9
The proposal to free all those sentenced for taking part in a violent rebellion against the legally elected government of the day was bound to provoke the right. In fact, the open determination of the left as a whole to release from prison all those sentenced for the uprising of 1934 was hardly an assurance of its respect for the rule of law and constitutional government. The Janus-like nature of the Popular Front alliance was demonstrated one week after the election. On the same day Diego Martínez Barrio said that the Popular Front was a ‘conservative enterprise’ and El Socialista proclaimed: ‘We are determined to do in Spain what has been done in Russia. The plan of Spanish socialism and Russian communism is the same.’10
The electoral pact, first urged by socialists and left republicans, had been born in the Asturias rising. It coincided with the new policy of the Comintern which called on communists to ally with non-revolutionary left-wing groups to fight the new threat of fascism in Europe. This was a two-stage plan, moderate at first, then revolutionary in the longer term.11 In June 1936 the Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov stated that given the present situation in Spain, ‘the fundamental and urgent task of the Communist Party in Spain and the Spanish proletariat’ was to ensure victory over fascism by completing ‘the democratic revolution’ and isolating ‘the fascists from the mass of peasants and urban petit bourgeoisie’.12
The Comintern controllers were hardly interested in preserving the middle class. The Popular Front strategy was simply a means to power. This was confirmed later at the Comintern’s meeting on 23 July to discuss the right-wing rising. Dimitrov warned that the Spanish communists should not attempt to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat ‘at the present stage’. ‘That would be a fatal mistake. Therefore we must say: act under the banner of defending the Republic…In other words, comrades, we believe that in the present international situation it is advantageous and necessary for us to carry out a policy that would preserve our opportunity to organize, educate, unify the masses and to strengthen our own positions in a number of countries–in Spain, France, Belgium and so forth–where there are governments dependent on the Popular Front and where the Communist Party has extensive opportunities. When our positions have been strengthened, then we can go further.’13
Going further also meant that the elimination of political rivals was a high priority right from the start. On 17 July, just as the anarchists were preparing to defeat the generals’ rising in Barcelona, the Comintern ‘advised’ the Spanish communist politburo: ‘It is necessary to take preventative measures with the greatest urgency against the putschist attempts of the anarchists, behind which the hand of the fascists is hidden.’14
The Spanish Communist Party, as the French Comintern representative André Marty reported later to Moscow, was run almost entirely by Vittorio Codovilla (who had the cover-name ‘Medina’) and the PSUC in Catalonia by Erno Gerö (alias ‘Singer’ or ‘Pedro’), another Comintern envoy. Marty later dismissed the work of the Spanish Communist Party’s politburo as ‘terribly primitive’.15 José Díaz was the only competent member, but he was too ill with liver problems to be effective.