Indalecio Prieto

Indalecio Prieto Tuero (born April 30, 1883 in Oviedo , † February 11, 1962 in Mexico City ) was a Spanish politician and leading figure of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) in the years before and during the Second Republic .

Life

When Prieto was six years old, his father died, after which his mother moved with him to Bilbao in the Basque Country in 1891 , where he was educated in a Protestant religious center. At a young age he had to earn his living by selling newspapers on the street; later he took work as a stenographer for the daily newspaper La Voz de Vizcaya (Eng. The voice of Vizcaya). This made him later up to the journalist with the rival newspaper El Liberal ; In the course of his career there, he made it to the position of director and eventually became the owner of the newspaper, which from then on served as the mouthpiece of his political views. From then on he habitually led an upper-class life.

In 1899 he joined the PSOE and four years later helped found the youth organization League of Young Socialists. During the first decade of the 20th century, Prieto became a leader in socialism in the Basque Country. In 1911 he was the first Spanish socialist to be elected to a provincial parliament ( Bizkaia ). During the First World War , the Spanish government had declared its neutrality , from which Spanish industry, especially the iron and steel industry in the Basque Country and trade, profited greatly, but the wages of Spanish workers remained completely unaffected by the boom . This led to great social tensions, which erupted on August 13, 1917 during a revolutionary general strike . The strikers called for the establishment of a provisional republican government, elections to a constituent assembly, and action against inflation . Fearing a repetition of the recent February Revolution in Russia (the October Revolution was still in the future), the general strike was brutally crushed by the military and the members of the strike committee were arrested. While the head of the UGT union , Francisco Largo Caballero and Julián Besteiro (1870–1940) were sentenced to “life” for their involvement in the strike organization and were imprisoned in Madrid , Prieto fled to France before he could be arrested and returned did not return until April 1918, when he had already been elected member of the Cortes .

He was hostile to government and army companies during the Second Moroccan War and, before Parliament after the Battle of Annual 1921, he strongly criticized the very likely, but unproven, responsibility of the king in General Fernández Silvestre's ill-considered military action in the command zone of Melilla .

When Miguel Primo de Rivera established his dictatorship in 1923 , he suspended the constitution , instituted censorship , imposed martial law, and announced that all of this would be done to eradicate corruption in the country and reorganize Spain. In contrast to Largo Caballero's line of partial collaboration with Primo de Rivera, Prieto refused any collaboration and was in strong confrontation with both. Largo Caballero had entered into a pact with the dictator and had the UGT declared the regime's official union and the rival, anarchist union CNT banned. Prieto then wrote: “ Largo Caballero is a madman who wants to appear clever. He's a cold bureaucrat who plays the role of a mad fanatic. In his reply, Largo Caballero described Prieto as " disapproving, arrogant and contemptible " and accused him of being neither a socialist by his ideals nor by his political practice.

Despite the resistance of Julián Besteiro, Prieto took part in the Pact of San Sebastián on his own in August 1930 during the dictatorship , which brought together a broad coalition of republican parties that wanted to abolish the Spanish monarchy . He also received the support of Largo Caballero's party wing, with whom he reconciled, in the conviction that the overthrow of the monarchy was necessary to pave the way for socialism. At a party congress, 10,607 delegates voted for and 8,326 against participation of the PSOE in a future coalition government.

Minister of Finance from 1931

After King Alfonso XIII. went into exile without abdication and the Second Republic was proclaimed on April 14, 1931, Prieto was appointed finance minister in the provisional government of Niceto Alcalá Zamora . Right from the start he had great difficulties to overcome because the owners of large fortunes had gone abroad with the king and thereby caused a fall in the external value of the currency . As Minister of Public Works in the government of Manuel Azana he put the large dam projects (both the electrification and the irrigation should promote) continued, which had been started during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, and extended it by ambitious plans for infrastructure improvement in Madrid, such as road construction projects and the new Chamartín train station, as well as the railway tunnel connecting Chamartín with Atocha train station , are still pending. Most of these projects were completed much later , however, as a result of the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939.

Shortly after the Republican election victory in 1931, which was supposed to replace the social and political order of the Restoration Monarchy , which had been prolonged by the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, there were considerable differences of opinion within the socialists, which led to the formation of wings within the PSOE that lasted until 1939 and beyond that persisted: the centrists elected Prieto as their representative, while Julián Besteiro became the figurehead of the revisionists and Largo Caballero acted as a representative of revolutionary voluntarism .

In 1933 the republican government was attacked by the left because it was accused of not being radical enough: three million day laborers and landless farm workers, the largest peasant proletariat in Western Europe, called for quick steps to overcome their misery. It is true that the automatic extension of the existing lease agreements was decreed and workers' collectives were legally given priority in the leasing of goods. The eight-hour day that is common in industry was also officially introduced for agricultural work, which amounted to a wage increase. Due to the ban mile decree of April 28, 1931, the large landowners were also denied the opportunity to bring wage pushers from other regions. With a further decree of April 7, 1931, the large landowners were forbidden to boycott the agrarian reform by breaking up further usable areas (approx. 30% of the cultivated area was fallow for political reasons) . However, Azaña had not followed the proposal of the Technical Commission, which had recommended that the agrarian reform be enacted by decree and that the right of lease be enforced through land occupations , but had laboriously put an agrarian reform law on the parliamentary route, which would allow the expropriation of the fallow fincas and the distribution of the Should enforce soil among the landless farmers through an agrarian reform institute for the purpose of private and / or collective use. As a result, anarcho-syndicalists revolted in Casas Viejas in January , whose uprising was brutally suppressed by the Guardia Civil and the Guardia de Asalto (14 prisoners were executed). The government was then damaged in front of its own majority in the Cortes.

Opposition from 1933

As early as September 1933, when Prietus and other members of the socialists left the government, the overthrow of the Azañas cabinet was inevitable. The next month, the republican coalition broke up, which, thanks to majority voting, brought the right-wing electoral alliance CEDA to power in collaboration with the centrist Alejandro Lerroux , who skillfully torpedoed all agricultural reforms that had been achieved by then.

Unlike Largo Caballero, Prieto rejected the general strike and the failed armed uprising in October 1934, but nevertheless fled to France to avoid possible prosecution . While he pursued a more relentless line than Largo Caballero in arguments during the dictatorship, since the republican period he belonged to the right-wing socialist camp, who rejected Largo Caballero's more revolutionary line.

In January 1936 reached Prieto along with Azaña a left electoral alliance of Socialists (PSOE), Communist ( PCE ) and Republican Union Party , which at the insistence of the Communists in France " Popular Front was called" the Popular Front . The election manifesto was far from a social revolution: the primary goals of the Popular Front were the restoration of Catalan autonomy , the liberation of the 30,000 prisoners of the 1934 uprising, an end to the political killings, the continuation of the agrarian reform torpedoed by Lerroux and the compensation of property owners that were harmed by the 1934 uprising. A Popular Front cabinet was widely expected to be headed by Prieto, but he did not get the support of his rival Largo Caballero, so Republican José Giral became Prime Minister.

Foreign Minister in the Caballero government from September 1936

However, during the first days of the Civil War, Prieto lost all illusions about Giral. After the Battle of Talavera de la Reina in the province of Toledo in September 1936, Largo Caballero took over the post of Prime Minister and Prieto took over the Ministry of the Navy and Air Force until May 1937.

The small Marxist party workers' unit POUM and the anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT, who were powerful in Catalonia , opposed the dissolution of their party militias in 1937 in favor of the republican army, in which they saw their influence waning through the political officers of the originally relatively insignificant Communist Party. Under pressure from Josef Stalin , the PCE then conducted an argument (" War in War ") in Barcelona between May 3 and 8, 1937, with the left-Marxist POUM, which was defamed as Trotskyist , and the anarchist CNT. The communists took this as an opportunity to provoke a government crisis in which Largo Caballero was ultimately forced to resign and was replaced by the right-wing socialist Juan Negrín . In the Negrin cabinet, Prieto took over the Ministry of Defense, although he was secretly no longer convinced that the Republicans could win the war after the democracies, above all Great Britain , France and the USA, isolated the Republicans instead of supporting them. During his tenure, the Republicans were largely cut off from Soviet supplies due to Italian submarine attacks and the closure of the French border .

After the defeat on the northern front with the capture of the Basque Country and Asturias by the insurgents in October 1937, Prieto offered his resignation, which was not accepted. After the collapse of the Aragon Front in March 1938 and the cooling of his relationship with Negrín and the communist ministers, the leader of the socialists was expelled from the government. At the beginning of the civil war, the communists, who assumed a rather subordinate role politically, sucked out all political camps of the left due to the arms delivery from the Soviet Union, took over the leadership of the socialist union Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (JSU, German United Socialists Youth), increased their membership to 400,000 and persecuted the anarchists, while the socialists only organized 160,000 members.

Exile in Mexico from 1939

During the remainder of the war, Prieto withdrew from active political life and went into exile in Mexico in March 1939 . As a special ambassador in various countries in South America, he survived the Second World War and led the majority wing of the Spanish Socialist Party in exile in Mexico. At the end of the Second World War in 1945 he was one of those who tried to form a republican government in exile in the hope of gaining a prospect of restoring Spanish democracy with the monarchist opposition to the dictator Francisco Franco . The backlash of this initiative led to Prieto's definitive withdrawal from active politics.

Prieto died of cardiovascular failure on February 11, 1962.

Works

• Palabras al viento (Eng. Words in the wind) 1942
• Discursos en América (German Debates in America) 1944
• Cartas a un escultor: pequeños detalles de grandes sucesos (German letter to a sculptor: small details of big events) 1962

Web links

Commons : Indalecio Prieto  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography of Indalecio Prieto (in English)
• Newspaper article about Indalecio Prieto in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .