Spanish Socialist Workers' Party
스페인 사회노동당
A Spanish socialist party founded in Madrid by Pablo Iglesias on 2 May 1879. It was a pillar of the governments of the Second Republic and of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, was outlawed under the Franco dictatorship and legalised again in 1977. After abandoning Marxism in 1979 it has governed Spain several times as a social democratic party.
In depth
The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party was founded on 2 May 1879 by the typesetter Pablo Iglesias in the Casa Labra tavern near the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. It aimed to organise the industrial proletariat on Marxist lines, but until the 1910s its strength was mostly limited to Madrid, Biscay and Asturias, and it was weak in Catalonia, where anarchism was strong. It founded the General Union of Workers (UGT) in Barcelona in 1888; according to the Spanish source, until the 1980s membership of the UGT entailed membership of the party. In 1910, within the Republican–Socialist Conjunction, Iglesias was elected to the Cortes for the first time.
Julián Besteiro, Francisco Largo Caballero and others who organised the general strike of August 1917 were sentenced to life imprisonment, but were released after being elected deputies in the 1918 election. In the crisis of the internationals of 1919–1921, supporters of joining the Comintern broke away in two splits, in 1920 and 1921, and formed the Communist Party of Spain. After Iglesias died in 1925, Besteiro became president of the party and the UGT, and parts of the party and the UGT engaged in limited collaboration with the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. Largo Caballero took up a post as Councillor of State in 1924, which Indalecio Prieto and Fernando de los Ríos opposed.
When the Second Republic was proclaimed in 1931, three party members entered the provisional government, and according to the Spanish source the party became the largest in the Constituent Cortes of 1931 with 131 deputies. After the right won the 1933 election, Largo Caballero called for revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat, and the UGT’s general strike of October 1934 grew into an armed insurrection in Asturias. The party joined the Popular Front in 1936, and during the Civil War Largo Caballero (from September 1936) and Juan Negrín (after the Barcelona May Days of 1937) headed the government in turn.
Under the Franco dictatorship the party was outlawed, and many leaders and members were imprisoned, exiled or executed; Besteiro died in a Francoist prison in 1940. At the first congress in exile in Toulouse in 1944 Rodolfo Llopis became secretary-general, but the exiled leadership drifted away from the organisation inside Spain. Felipe González became secretary-general at the Suresnes congress of 1974, and the party was legalised again in 1977. After abandoning Marxism at an extraordinary congress in 1979, it won the 1982 election and governed until 1996, and later led governments under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in 2004–2011 and under Pedro Sánchez from 2018.