Republican Left (Spain)
공화좌파 (스페인)
A Spanish left-republican party founded by Manuel Azaña in 1934. It played a prominent role in the Second Republic and in the run-up to the Civil War, and as part of the Popular Front it led the government in 1936. Under the Franco dictatorship it was active in exile in Mexico, and in 1960 it merged with Republican Union into Spanish Democratic Republican Action (ARDE).
In depth
After the left-republican parties' heavy defeat in the 1933 election, which they had contested separately, Republican Left was formed on 3 April 1934 by merging Azaña's Republican Action (AR), the Independent Radical Socialist Republican Party of Marcelino Domingo and Álvaro de Albornoz, and Santiago Casares Quiroga's Autonomous Galician Republican Organisation (ORGA). In Catalonia it took the name Partit Republicà d'Esquerra. Azaña became president of its first National Council, and its founders included José Giral and Victoria Kent. Its organ was the newspaper Política.
As part of the Popular Front it won 87 deputies in the election of 16 February 1936, becoming the third parliamentary group after the PSOE and the CEDA, and Azaña became president of the Council of Ministers. When Azaña was elected president of the Republic in May 1936, fellow party member Casares Quiroga succeeded him as prime minister, and after the Civil War broke out another member, Giral, followed. The party was the main component of the government until Largo Caballero's cabinet of September 1936 and remained in every government until the end of the war. Azaña stayed president until he resigned in February 1939.
In exile in Mexico the party was the main support of the Republican government-in-exile, but in 1951 it left the government over what it saw as a 'monopoly' of Republican Union (UR). In July 1959 it drafted, with Republican Union, the founding manifesto of Spanish Democratic Republican Action, and at the first congress in Paris on 16–18 June 1960 the two parties merged into ARDE. After Franco's death a party of the same name applied for registration and was authorised in November 1977, but without the weight of the historic party.