Paul Preston - Franco

On 27 April, Ramón Serrano Suñer made a journey to the Canary Islands with the difficult task of persuading his brother-in-law to withdraw his candidacy for the re-run elections about to take place in Cuenca. In the wake of the so-called Popular Front elections of 16 February 1936, the parliamentary committee entrusted with examining the validity of the outcome, the comisión de actas , had declared the results null and void in certain provinces. One of these was Cuenca, where there had been falsification of votes. Moreover, once the defective votes were discounted, no list of candidates reached the 40 per cent of votes necessary to win the majority block of seats. 14 In the re-run elections scheduled for the beginning of May 1936, the right-wing slate included both José Antonio Primo de Rivera and General Franco. The Falange leader was included in the hope of securing for him the parliamentary immunity which would ensure his release from jail where he had been since 17 March. 15

Serrano Suñer was behind Franco’s late inclusion in the right-wing list announced on 23 April. 16 On 20 April, a letter from Franco to the secretary of the CEDA expressed his interest in being a candidate in one of the forthcoming re-run elections, preferably Cuenca. Gil Robles discussed the matter with Serrano Suñer. When he approved Franco’s candidacy, Serrano Suñer set off immediately for the Canary Islands to inform his brother-in-law. The monarchist leader Antonio Goicoechea offered to give up his place in the right-wing list but Gil Robles simply instructed the CEDA provincial chief in Cuenca, Manuel Casanova, to stand down. The support for Franco manifested by the CEDA and Renovación Española was not replicated by the third political party involved in Cuenca, the Falange. When the revised list of right-wing candidates was published, Gil Robles received a visit from Miguel Primo de Rivera who came to inform him that his brother was firmly opposed to the list, regarding the inclusion of Franco as a ‘crass error’.

Since Varela was also standing in the simultaneous rerun at Granada, José Antonio Primo de Rivera shrewdly wished to avoid his chances of election being diminished if the rightist eagerness for military candidates were too transparent. He also, in the wake of his unfortunate meeting with Franco before the February elections, regarded the general as likely to be a disaster in the Cortes. He threatened to withdraw from the Cuenca list if Franco’s name was not removed, something which Gil Robles felt unable to do. Efforts by various right-wing leaders including Serrano Suñer failed to persuade the Falange leader to withdraw his opposition to Franco. José Antonio said to Serrano Suñer: ‘This is not what he’s good at and, given that what is brewing is something more conclusive than a parliamentary offensive, let him stay in his territory and leave me where I have already proved myself’. Serrano was then obliged to inform Franco. He managed to persuade his brother-in-law that he would not take well to the cut-and-thrust of parliamentary debate. The argument that Franco would be risking public humiliation did the trick. On 27 April, Franco withdrew and Manuel Casanova returned to the list. 17 Franco was aware of the Falangist leader’s hostility to his candidacy and subsequent events would show that he neither forgave nor forgot.

The Left, and Prieto in particular, were concerned that Franco planned to use his parliamentary seat as a base from which to engage in military plotting. This was a reasonable interpretation and was indeed adopted by Francoist propaganda once the Civil War was under way. However, it is not clear whether Franco’s quest for a parliamentary seat was motivated by the need to effect his transfer from the Canary Islands to the mainland in order to play a key role in the conspiracy or by more selfish motives. Gil Robles suggested that the desire to go into politics reflected Franco’s doubts about the success of a military rising. As yet undeclared vis-à-vis the conspiracy, he wanted a safe position in civilian life from which to await events. 18 Fanjul confided a similar opinion to Basilio Alvarez, who had been a Radical deputy for Orense in 1931 and 1933: ‘perhaps Franco wants to protect himself from any governmental or disciplinary inconvenience by means of parliamentary immunity.’ 19

Certainly, the versions of the Cuenca episode produced by Franco and his propagandists make it clear that it was to be an abiding source of embarrassment. Within a year, Franco was to be found rewriting it, through his official biographer Joaquín Arrarás. In his 1937 version, the parties of the Right offered Franco a place in the list for Cuenca, because he was a persecuted man and to allow him the freedom ‘to organize the defence of Spain’. Franco ‘publicly rejected’ the offer because he neither believed in the honesty of the election process nor expected anything from the Republican parliament. 20 This ludicrously inaccurate version of the events surrounding the Cuenca elections implied that, if the electoral system had been honest, Franco would have stood. Subsequently in 1940, Arrarás eliminated this inadvertent proclamation of faith in democracy and claimed that Franco had withdrawn his candidacy because of ‘the twisted interpretations’ to which it was subject. 21 A decade after the events, Franco himself claimed in a speech to the Falangist Youth in Cuenca that his desire to be a parliamentary deputy was occasioned by ‘dangers for the Patria ’. 22

By the early 1960s, Franco was eschewing any hint that he might have been seeking a bolt-hole. Writing in the third person, he claimed rather that ‘General Franco was looking for a way of legally leaving the archipelago which would permit him to establish a more direct contact with the garrisons in order to have a more direct link with those places where there was a danger of the Movement being a failure’. There is an outrageous re-casting of history in this account. Franco attributes to himself the credit for securing a place for José Antonio Primo de Rivera in the right-wing candidacy, which is simply untrue. With equal inaccuracy, he claims that General Fanjul had stood down as a candidate to make way for Franco himself when he had done so for José Antonio. He then fudges the reasons for the eventual withdrawal of his own candidacy with the vague and incorrect statement that, on the morning that candidates were to be announced, he received a telegram from those concerned ( los afectados ) to the effect that ‘it was impossible to maintain his candidacy because his name had been ‘burned’ ( quemado ). 23

That Franco should omit to mention the rift with the leader of the Falange was entirely understandable. After all, after 1937, the Nationalist propaganda machine would work frenetically to convert Franco into the heir to José Antonio in the eyes of the Falangist masses. Similarly, in writing that his intention was to be able to oversee the preparations for a coup, Franco inadvertently revealed his desire to diminish Mola’s posthumous glory as the sole director of the rising. In his third and most plausible attempt to rewrite the Cuenca episode, Arrarás wrote that Franco withdrew ‘because he preferred to attend to his military duties, by which means he believed he could better serve the national interest’. The suggestion of any friction between Franco and José Antonio Primo de Rivera remained taboo. 24

Left-wing suspicions of Franco’s motives were expressed by Indalecio Prieto shortly after Franco’s candidacy was dropped, in a celebrated speech in Cuenca. He commented that ‘General Franco, with his youth, with his gifts, with his network of friends in the Army, is a man who could at a given moment be the caudillo of a movement with the maximum chances of success’. Accordingly, without attributing such intentions to Franco, Prieto claimed that other right-wing plotters were seeking to get parliamentary immunity for him in order to facilitate his conversion into ‘the caudillo of a military subversion’. 25 In any case, the Cuenca election was declared at the last minute to be technically a re-run. Since the electoral law required that candidates in a re-run should have secured 8 per cent of the vote in the first round, new candidates could not be admitted by the provincial Junta del Censo. Accordingly, although José Antonio Primo de Rivera gained sufficient votes to win a seat, his election was not recognized. 26