Democratic projects in the Second Spanish Republic. The centrist speech of Manuel Portela Valladares

Abstract

In December 1935, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, president of the Second Spanish Republic, named Manuel Portela Valladares chief of his Government with the mission to organize the elections and to try to obtain a wide minority of center that was moderating the camera. This appointment usually is judged as the maneuver of an opportunist without definite ideology or as the choice of a dummy who was allowing to Alcala Zamora to increase his control on the political situation. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate, through analysis of Portela Valladares’s discourse and review of his career during this period, that this political defended a real center project, coherent with his experience and his liberal creed and which purpose was to make easier rapprochement between the conflicting visions for stabilize political life and consolidate the Republican regime.