The Civil War in Spain

Causes

In 1930 The great Depression hit Spain had terrible consequences for the country, including the rise of unemployment which caused president Rivera to resign as he did not have the proper ability to manage the financial crisis, because of this issue the military had stopped providing its support and withdrew Rivera, this ended up with Rivera’s resignation. After Rivera resigned, elections were held in Spain in the month of April 1931, republicans ended up winning all the major cities in Spain. Which caused great fear to king Alfonso as he knew that republicans were against him and if he would have stayed Spain would of have even more crisis than the ones they were facing at the time. So he decided to abdicate which led republicans to declare Spain a republic with an abolished monarchy.

The new republic did not start in very good situations, as it had to face a major of new problems: starting with Catalonia and the Basque regions wanting independence from Spain, let’s not forget that this two regions were very important in Spain, so of course they did not get their independence. The government also had also reduced the influence of the army in politics as they thought too much say in it. The great depression left many other issues for the republic and the country, including the falling of iron(33%) and steel production(50%), this occurred because people had no money to pay for this products. In the agricultural side, the prices of crops were hit by the great depression too, which were very bad news as Spain was primarily an agricultural country, olive oil and wine had lost its value, and the agricultural land used to produce had stopped being used. All this factors caused unemployment in both the agricultural and industry fields, also wages for workers had been cut because of the great depression struggle in the country.

Because of all the economic problems, the republic lost the support of the working class which was terrible news for the government as it was the class whose support was most needed. The people in government had different ideas on what to do and how to handle this issues, those in the left had different viewings than those on the right and this caused political fighting within the two parties that could of have led to a social revolution. Those in the middle in parliament, who were socialists and middle class radicals did resolve some problems, like giving Catalonia a little bit of self- government. The government made some changes in the Roman Catholic Church, which did not make the church very happy as the government had taken away many of its privileges including: Priests would no longer get paid by the state so their salaries had to be paid by the church itself, the government and the Roman Catholic Church turned into two separate bodies, Jesuits were expelled from Spain, which was something ironic because Jesuits were founded by Spain,

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