It seems incredible, but, at this point, there are still those who doubt that the victory brought by the Second Republic in the elections of April 12, 1931 was clean. Those who defend this theory seem to forget, for example, that Alfonso XIII himself In his farewell manifesto to the nation, he acknowledged that the consultation had shown that he no longer had the love of his people.
In turn, Admiral Aznar, the last head of government of the monarchy, made a famous comment to the press in which he admitted the magnitude of the electoral debacle: “What more crisis do you want than that of a country that we believed to be monarchical and in twenty-four hours he presents himself to us as a republican!”.
Professor at the Carlos III University of Madrid, Francisco Sánchez Pérez, an excellent specialist in the period, explains to us in El Germinal español (Akal) how it was possible for municipal elections to trigger a regime change. It is true that the monarchist candidacies obtained more councillors, but the republicans clearly prevailed in most large cities.
Why, then, did the monarchy collapse? After all, although everyone knew that the vote in the cities was free, this was not the case in rural areas, where everything depended on the management of the caciques and it was easy for a victory to be proclaimed when only one candidate appeared.
After the fall of the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, the Restoration system believed it was possible to resume normal life as if nothing had happened. The April elections, in principle, had to be done in the traditional style: power organized them so that those who were designated beforehand emerged victorious.
In a more than significant way, on March 10, the Minister of the Interior sent a telegram to the civil governors in which he stated that it was essential “that the monarchical triumph give true sensation to public opinion.” Therefore, it was necessary to pretend that the citizens were expressing their true will, even though everything possible was done to distort the meaning of the vote.
However, everything was going to go wrong for supporters of Alfonso XIII. Sánchez Pérez shows that it is not true that they deludedly thought that municipal elections were unimportant. Their propaganda shows, on the contrary, that they were convinced that what was at stake was neither more nor less than the continuity of civilization, of the unity of the homeland, of the Catholic religion and of the family. If the Republicans won, Spain would be plunged into the chaos of the communist revolution.
This apocalyptic message was spread basically through the press. The Republicans, on the other hand, used more modern methods in their campaign, such as rallies, in which they could reach a larger audience, especially considering the high level of illiteracy that existed in the country.
Although, in theory, what was at stake on April 12 was not the state model, in practice it was so because the monarchy had discredited itself by accepting the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. The lawyer Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo, a moderate who defined himself as a “monarchist without a king”, pointed out that, in Spain, after the suspension of the Constitution in 1923, it could no longer be said that a valid government existed. In these circumstances, as Sánchez Pérez shows, power exhibited such a lack of legitimacy that it was very easy for its enemies to turn the municipal elections into a de facto plebiscite.
