Radical Republican Party (Spain)
급진공화당 (스페인)
The Spanish republican party founded by Alejandro Lerroux in Santander on 6 January 1908. Beginning as an anticlerical, liberal republican movement, it became one of the main parties of the Second Republic and led several governments, but drifted to the right, was engulfed by corruption scandals and collapsed in the 1936 elections. Clara Campoamor, champion of women’s suffrage, was one of its deputies until 1934.
In depth
The Radical Republican Party was founded on 6 January 1908 at a rally in a Santander theatre by Lerroux’s followers, who split from Nicolás Salmerón’s Republican Union over its alliance with the Catalanist coalition Solidaritat Catalana. Its roots lay in the movement Lerroux had built in Barcelona with a workerist, anticlerical and anti-Catalanist discourse that drew in immigrant workers. At first it held tendencies from a Radical-Socialist left to Lerroux’s right, but as its left wings split away it became a centre and centre-right party by the early 1930s.
In the Second Republic the Radical Republican Party led governments from December 1933, but its drift to the right provoked strong dissent. Clara Campoamor, elected for Madrid on its ticket in 1931 and the leading voice for women’s suffrage, left it in 1934 over its subordination to the CEDA and the excesses of the repression of the Asturias rising; in May 1934 Diego Martínez Barrio resigned the vice-presidency and left too. Corruption scandals such as the “estraperlo” drove Lerroux from the government in September 1935, and in the 1936 elections the party collapsed to 1.1 per cent and five seats, vanishing after the outbreak of the civil war.