Indalecio Prieto becomes Spains prime minister in April 1936

Spanish Socialist leader Indalecio Prieto was considered a possible prime minister in April 1936 when Azana became president. What I've always been intrigued about him is the respect that elements on the Spanish right had for him. For instance I read somewhere, perhaps Payne's book about the last months before the war, that Primo De Rivera had so much respect for Prieto that he would seek to join his Falange to the Socialists if Prieto became prime minister. Anyway, this idea of Prieto taking power and perhaps splitting the right wing forces arrayed against the Republic is a new avenue of AH to consider.
 
First of all, welcome to the board!

That's a very interesting point of divergence you post there. Prieto was certainly someone in the most centrist wing of the socialist party, which gained him friends in the right, but also enemies within his own party. Could Prieto as President of the Council have gained enough leverage from April to July 1936 to prevent or delay the Civil War? I don't know. The military was going to rise because the generals had been preparing their coup since February; and respected or not, Prieto was still a socialist. IOTL a compromise candidate from a galician nationalist party was elected to prevent excessive turmoil from having a socialist as head of the government. And, anyway, Primo de Rivera was very prone to that sort of boutades with no actual meaning. What the Republic needed in the spring of 1936 to prevent war was someone from the left who was willing to exercise authority -within the bounds of republican legality, or course-, and Indalecio Prieto, while respected, did not seem to be that sort of man.
 
By coincidence I've been re-reading on the opening stages of the SCW. The book in question pictures a situation between July 17 and 20 that is rarely considered, and it is that the coup was largely a failure and everything seemed to be against the rebels. The industrial and most populated areas remained with the government, so did the airforce and the navy patrolling the straits, and Sanjurjo was dead. It concludes declaring that had the PM been anyone with a bit of initiative rather than the ones that paraded through the seat those few days (Casares, Barrio, Giral) the coup would have been either stomped, or fizzled into a short, localized rebellion.

There are of course things to argue against that (after all the Italian and German support was very quick to arrive and once landed the Army of Africa was nearly unstoppable to any force in the Peninsula - either rebel or loyalist) but it's something to feed though.
 
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