Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas

The Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas [ komfeðeɾaˈθjon espaˈɲola ðe ðeˈɾetʃas au̯ˈtonomas ] (CEDA; German Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right ) was an alliance of Spanish political parties in the Second Republic in Spain . It was founded on March 4, 1933 .

The CEDA consisted mainly of right-wing Catholic parties. The most influential of them was Acción Popular (Eng. Popular Action ), the successor party of the Acción Nacional founded on April 29, 1931, two weeks after the proclamation of the republic . The National Committee (the Board) of Acción Popular was chaired by the later Cardinal Ángel Herrera Oria , founder and director of the newspaper El Debate and the head of the influential Acción Católica . After the first elections, Acción Nacional was headed by José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones . Other member parties of the CEDA were Derecha Regional Valenciana (German Valencian Regional Rights ) and Unión Regional de Derechas (German Regional Union of Right ) from Galicia. In addition, there were agrarian-conservative small parties and associations from various places and provinces in Spain, particularly from Castile and Galicia, but also from the Rioja and the Balearic Islands.

At its core, the CEDA was a clerical-conservative party that stood up for a corporate state. On the one hand it is counted on the Christian Democratic spectrum, on the other hand it is classified as fascist , in particular because of the orientation of its youth organization, the Juventudes de Acción Popular (JAP).

In practice, the CEDA followed the line of the Acción Popular , which - unlike republicans and monarchists - regarded the question of the form of government as secondary ( accidentalismo ). The party's motto, "Religion, Family, Fatherland, Order, Work and Property", presents the party's orientation and program in a nutshell.

For the election on November 19, 1933 , the CEDA formed electoral alliances with various parties, including the monarchist Renovación Española (German: Spanish Renewal ), which also came from the Acción Católica . The reason was the current Spanish electoral law, which the majority party strongly favored.

The leader of the CEDA was José María Gil-Robles, a bourgeois Catholic who had married a noblewoman. During his honeymoon in Germany he had started to admire Hitler, but because of the attitude of the National Socialists towards the Catholic Church, he turned more towards Austria, whose dictator Engelbert Dollfuss wanted a clerical-fascist corporate state.

Gil-Robles' political goals were to turn the CEDA into a Catholic mass party and, after the successful takeover, first to abolish the secular constitutional articles. Gil-Robles pursued the strategy of gaining power through elections, but then abolishing democracy:

“ We have to move forward to a New State. Who cares if blood is spilled in the process? We finally have to get things done, that's what counts. In order to achieve this ideal, we will not be held back by traditional ideas. For us, democracy is not the goal, but a means of conquering a new state. When the time comes, the Cortes will submit - or we will make them disappear. "

However, these words seem to contradict the actual policy of the CEDA, which left the republican legitimacy - in its new function as a smaller coalition partner - untouched even when the suppression of the socialist uprising in autumn 1934 offered the possible opportunity to do so.

The winner of the 1933 election was the heterogeneous right-wing electoral alliance. The CEDA and its allies received 110 seats and became the strongest force in the Spanish parliament, but without having obtained the majority required to form a government. Despite the fact that the CEDA was the strongest party, it was not commissioned by President Niceto Alcalá Zamora to form a government and so tolerated a government of the Center under Alejandro Lerroux ( Partido Republicano Radical ) and later also provided some ministers. Among other things, she obtained an amnesty for various representatives of right-wing circles who had played an active role in the attempted coup by José Sanjurjo and the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, and the return of some lands previously expropriated by the government to the original owners, large landowners. This encouraged various conservative large landowners and employers to worsen the working conditions of workers and day laborers, which had previously been improved by the Republican government.

When, under pressure from CEDA, which now refused to support the minority government that emerged from the democratic elections in 1933, instead of new elections in October 1934 , the cabinet was reorganized, which was now joined by three CEDA ministers, and an uprising broke out socialist forces with their center in Oviedo ( Asturias ). Among the new members of the CEDA government were Berenguer and Aznar, two members of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship who had just been given amnesty by the government. Leading politicians, the military and the police were also involved in the strike and insurrection movement. This was suppressed with hard hand, especially under the command of General López Ochoa in Asturias within twenty days, while the uprising in the other provinces collapsed within the first hours and days; Franco was in command of the military counterinsurgency operations .

In the February 1936 election, the CEDA lost some of its seats, as this time left-wing parties had come together to form the Frente Popular (German Popular Front ), and then only had 86 members of parliament. The government now provided the Popular Front, the political opponent of CEDA. The electoral victory of the Popular Front intensified the political climate in Spain: There were street fights, riots against churches and priests as well as assassinations of figures from the right and left camps. The murder of the monarchist politician and harsh government critic José Calvo Sotelo by members of the security police (Spanish Guardia de Seguridad y Asalto ) and socialist militia members formed the direct justification for a coup by various military units on July 17, 1936 , which resulted in the Spanish civil war expanded.

On the right ( nationalist ) side, General Francisco Franco dissolved all parties except Falange Española in 1937 , including the CEDA, which Franco had supported, but whose political participation during the republic had been sharply criticized by old Falangists. Leading members of the CEDA like Ramón Serrano Súñer then joined the Falange.