Republican Left of Catalonia
카탈루냐 공화좌파
A Catalan republican, nationalist party of the left founded at the Conference of the Catalan Left in Sants, Barcelona, in March 1931 by the merger of Francesc Macià's Estat Català, Lluís Companys's Catalan Republican Party and the L'Opinió group. It led the Catalan government under the Second Republic and, during the Civil War, tried to hold the anti-fascist coalition together under Companys's Generalitat. Outlawed under Franco, it re-emerged after the transition and is today a social-democratic party of Catalan independence.
In depth
After the fall of Primo de Rivera the Catalan left sought to build a united front around Macià, and the Republican Left of Catalonia was founded on 19 March 1931. It won the municipal elections of 12 April, and two days later, hours before the Republic was proclaimed in Madrid, Macià proclaimed in Barcelona a Catalan Republic within an Iberian Federation. Because this departed from the Pact of San Sebastián, it was settled three days later with the Madrid government that Macià would become President of the Generalitat, an autonomous government within the Republic. In the Catalan Parliament elected under the 1932 Statute the ERC and its allies won 67 of 85 seats, and the Generalitat passed laws to improve the lives of the popular classes and the petty bourgeoisie, including the Crop Contracts Law protecting tenant farmers.
When Macià died in December 1933, Companys became President of the Generalitat. On 6 October 1934, in protest at the entry of the right-wing CEDA into the government, Companys proclaimed a Catalan State within a Spanish Federal Republic; the army suppressed it, the leaders were jailed and the Statute was suspended until February 1936. In the 1936 election the ERC led the Catalan Popular Front (the Left Front), which won 41 of 54 seats, and the new government's pardon restored the Generalitat.
In the Civil War the ERC, as the leading force in the Generalitat, tried to hold the coalition together amid the conflict between the POUM and the pro-Soviet Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), and to recover control from the CNT militias who held real power. It could not prevent the Republican government from taking over Catalonia's public order after the May Days of 1937. Franco outlawed the party in 1939, and Companys was shot at Montjuïc Castle in 1940; the party carried on anti-Franco resistance in exile and underground.