The
1934 Argentine General Election was held on April 1, 1934, and would lead to the 4th consecutive UCR election to the presidency, with Marcelo Alvear returning to the Pink House for a second stint after his 1922-1928 term. He succeeded his correligionist Enrique Martinez, Yrigoyen's soft-spoken Vice President who completed the old Radical leader's term after his death in June 1930. Martinez's time in office had been challenging, taking over in the midst of the Great Depression and a coupist conspiracy planning to depose the ailing Yrigoyen; Interior Minister Elpidio Gonzalez had gotten wind of the conspiracy shortly before the president's death, and with Martinez's support and cooperation from War Minister Dellepiane, the
putschist ringleaders were rounded up and deported to the Ushuahia Penal colony by September of 1930.
This broke the fever among opponents of the Radical party, doubly so with the death of the man who concentrated much of that opposition personally; but Yrigoyen's passing also forced the party and its opposition to fully reckon with their motives. The Anti-Personalist UCR unraveled at the national level in his absence, with the splinter parties that had split with the national organization because of personal grievances against Yrigoyen starting their progression toward reintegration while the ones that - like the man who lost against Yrigoyen in 1928, Leopoldo Melo - opposed his policies, and found Alvear just as unacceptable as a replacement despite his traditional leadership of the Anti-Personalist faction nationally.
The 1932 legislative election would help crystalize some of these shifts: Melo and other like-minded Anti-Personalists coordinated their efforts with the Confederation of the Rights, eating away at the UCR's lower house majority and entrenching a conservative majority in the Senate. But the expanded Senate majority helped Melo another way: it gave him a good reason to decline another losing run in 1934, with all signs pointing to the clearest front-runner Alvear running again. The task of running against Alvear then fell to Julio Argentino Pascual Roca, likewise a scion of a powerful political dynasty, but one with far more recent claims to fame than Alvear's: Julio Pascual Roca's father had been president twice (from 1880 to 1886, and again from 1898 to 1904).
Roca Jr. would prove stiffer competition than expected, especially with his ticket augmented by leading Anti-Personalist Radical Roberto Maria Ortiz, but Alvear remained broadly popular from his time in government, and the result would be an emphatic 14 point win and a 2 to 1 majority in the Electoral College for the
porteño leader. But there were worrying signs for the future, with Alvear's triumph owing more to nostalgia for the booming economy of his first term than anything else. The Great Depression dragged on under Martinez, and the voters turned to Alvear in hopes that lightning might strike twice; the party ran 4 points behind its presidential candidate in the legislative elections, which while more than enough to secure a resounding win, saw the party lose a handful of seats. Most impressively, Roca Jr.'s party, which he launched nationally as the National Democratic Party, managed to coalesce the opposition vote in almost every province, failing to win seats only in Santa Fe (where De la Torre's Progressive Democratic Party came close to beating the Radicals for first) and Capital Federal (where the Independent Socialist Party just barely failed to repeat their win from 1932).
Before Alvear had even been sworn in for his second term, the jockeying for 1940 would begin: with Yrigoyen dead, the field was wide open in the party. Roca meanwhile took heart in his strong performance, and thought a closer election against a less known rival in six years was winnable. But the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 would throw a wrench into all their plans...
