WI: Popular Front loses the Spanish elections of 1936

I had a post on that some years ago in soc.history.what-if . Here's part of it:

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We've had many what-ifs on the Spanish Civil War but I don't recall any on
what would have happened if the Popular Front had lost the elections in
February 1936. Yet that does not seem so implausible; after all, in OTL
the victory of the Popular Front was far from overwhelming:

Electors............. 13.553.710
Voters............... 9.864.783 (72%)
Popular front...... 4.654.116 (34,3%)
National front..... 4.503.505 (33,2%)
Center and Basque....... 525.714 (5,4%)
https://web.archive.org/web/20020803143704/http://www.guerracivil1936.galeon.com/popularfront.htm

(The electoral system gave the Left an exaggerated share of the seats in
parliament, just as it had done for the Right in 1933. As Stanley Payne
has observed, "The great majority of votes were cast in much the same way
as in 1933, the main differences being the shift by Radical voters and the
partial participation of the CNT membership." *Spain's First Democracy:
The Second Republic 1931-1936*, p. 277)

So what do we need in order to make the Popular Front lose? Maybe the key
is provided by Payne's remarks on "the partial participation of the CNT
membership." What if the Anarchists in February 1936 adhered to their
prior opposition to participation in elections? The Anarchists were by no
means unanimous on this point and some did abstain, but in a close race,
those who did vote--attracted by the Popular Front's promise of amnesty
for Anarchist and other political prisoners--may have made the difference.
Murray Bookchin in *The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936*,
notes that Urales, perhaps the most venerated of the Anarchists, warned
that it would be "a great error on the part of the anarchists if, as a
consequence of their action during the electoral period, the rightists
triumphed over the leftists." (p. 278) Durruti also opposed abstention
and later said: "We came to tell the Left that we were the ones who
decided your triumph...It was our generosity that decided the reconquest
of February 16th." (p. 284)

Suppose the Anarchists had abstained, and the Popular Front had lost.
Here are two contrasting Anarchist views of the consequences:

(1) "In his book Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, Vernon Richards raised
a forbidden question: did the CNT leadership take into account that by
ensuring the electoral victory of the left it was also ensuring that the
generals of the right would stage a military putsch which the respectable
left politicians would not restrain? 'On the other hand a victory of the
right, which was almost certain if the CNT abstained, would mean the end
of the military conspiracy and the coming to power of a reactionary but
ineffectual government which, like its predecessors, would hold out for
not more than a year or two. There is no real evidence to show that there
was any significant development of a fascist movement in Spain along the
lines of the regimes in Italy and Germany.'"
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/colin-ward-the-case-against-voting.html

(Of course one may ask: if a conservative government fell apart in one or
two years, what then? If its fall led to new elections and a victory by
the Left, wouldn't OTL's 1936--including a military revolt and civil war--
simply happen one or two years later?)

(2) By contrast, Bookchin, while admitting some force in "Vernon
Richards' observation that a conservative victory in the February election
would have been far less of a setback to the Spanish labor movement than
the slaughter that followed the generals' rebellion" nevertheless takes a
darker view of the mainstream Spanish Right and its leader Gil Robles:
"Gil Robles seemed definitely intent on becoming Spain's Dollfuss (his
public speeches had acquired an unprecedentedly violent character) and the
CEDA's electoral posters had a distinctly fascistic flavor, appealing for
the 'Ministry of War and all the power,' 'all power to the Leader,' and
the like" (p. 283)

***

As that post indicates, there have been varying estimates of CEDA, which would presumably dominate any right-of-center elected government. CEDA was not exactly a clerical-fascist party and it wasn't exactly a Christian Democratic party either--though there were representatives of both tendencies in the party. The dominant tendency, however, represented by Gil Robles, was "accidentalist"--i.e., either a democratic or authoritarian regime could be satisfactory if it maintained order and the rights of the Church. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_María_Gil-Robles_y_Quiñones

Probably Gil Robles would at least make a show of governing in a legal, parliamentary way. No doubt there would be repression against the Left, but it is hard to see it reaching the extremes it did under Franco. And unlike the Right in OTL, the Left would not be powerful enough to start a full-scale civil war. What would happen would probably be more like 1934: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asturian_miners'_strike_of_1934
 
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Say TTL's Spanish Civil War begins in 1938 instead of 1936 in more or less the same manner, would the international response to it be the same? Would an additional +/- 2 years of Hitler be enough to convince Britain and France to adopt a different policy towards the new leftist government?
 
This is what I wrote in an older thread:.

If you have José María Gil-Robles and CEDA win the 1936 Parliamentary elections with a commanding lead you would see no military coup at all, instead you could see general unrest by anarchists and communists, with the military backing the Republic instead. You would end up with a right-wing Spanish Republic, bordering on fascist, and with some clashes against communists and anarchists rather than a full scale civil war.

The moderates end up in a complicated situation no matter what, the political climate was already very polarized.
 

CalBear

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To the OP:

Firstly, welcome to the Board. I hope you enjoy your time here.

Now to business.

Please give some more depth in you Opening Posts. This is meant to be a Discussion Board, not a Q&A site, that means you need to be an active participant in the threads you start, beginning with the Opening scenario.

Thanks.
 
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