Somewhere/Anywhere Podcast.
Spanish Political Parties Series Part 4 of 8
Every origin story worth telling has its incongruities, and the Spanish Socialist Party offers a particularly rich one. The first episode of this 3-part episode opens with a Bizet aria, a wall of Goya’s blackest paintings arriving at the Prado, and a founding manifesto proclaiming the war between two unequal and antagonistic classes. From these three artifacts the conversation reconstructs how a party born among Madrid café printers in 1879, with the husband of Karl Marx’s daughter Laura sitting at the table, grew over the following century into the organization that would claim to embody modern Spain itself.
It is, Diego and Rasheed, insist, a story that cannot be told without the deep history surrounding it. So before the socialists do much of anything, we pass through the long and turbulent nineteenth century that produced them, the dynastic civil wars fought in the name of a pretender called Carlos, the glorious revolution that toppled Isabella II, the brief farce of an imported Italian king, and the conservative settlement that Antonio Cánovas del Castillo engineered to end the chaos. That settlement, the Restoration, ran on turnismo, a gentleman’s agreement by which liberals and conservatives simply traded power between themselves, and the hosts cannot resist noting how closely the complaint resembles the charge of bipartidismo leveled at the two large parties today.
Into this closed system arrive the ideas that would tear at Spain for a hundred years. The episode traces the rivalry between Marx and Bakunin and explains why anarchism, not socialism, found the readier soil in a rural country with little industry and little appetite for capturing a state that most peasants experienced only as a tax collector and a recruiting sergeant. It follows the institutional brotherhood with the German social democrats that would, generations later, quietly finance the rise of Felipe González. And it lingers over the texture of the age, the tertulias and the sobremesa, the printers and the pamphlets, the bourgeois comfort of men who theorized the abolition of the bourgeoisie over wine.
The narrative then gathers pace through the catastrophes that made the party matter. The disaster of 1898 and the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines gives way to the corrosive pessimism of the Generation of ‘98, the essayists whom the hosts accuse, not gently, of pouring intellectual gasoline on the fire. We move to the Tragic Week of 1909, whose brutal suppression broke Pablo Iglesias’s isolation and won the socialists their first seat in Congress through an alliance with the republicans, and then to the delegation sent to Lenin’s Moscow and met with the chilling question, freedom, what for. After a comfortable spell of collaboration with the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera comes the Republic, and with it the heart of the hosts’ argument.
Rasheed and Diego walk through the genuine reforms of 1931, the electoral rout of 1933, and the armed rising in Asturias in 1934 that they regard, alongside historians such as Stanley Payne, as the real beginning of the Civil War, a socialist insurrection put down by a general named Francisco Franco in what is, in this telling, his first decisive appearance. By 1936, with the Popular Front narrowly and contestably in power and José Calvo Sotelo murdered, the road runs only one way, and the party that had spent six decades fighting to reach paradise finds itself instead in exile in Toulouse, a charity case kept alive by foreign comrades while communists, reformists and students did the actual work of opposing Franco.
What holds the whole sweep together is an uncomfortable thesis, advanced without much restraint, that the socialists were for most of this period not the protagonists of Spanish history but one actor among several in a wider insurgency against the established order, and that on the rare occasions they laid hands on real power before 1975 the nation came apart. The fact that the words Popular Front are being whispered again in 2026, as a governing left weighs a single list to hold off the right, gives the history an edge that is anything but academic. This is the first of several parts, and it ends precisely where the party’s long thaw is about to begin.