The civil directorate of Miguel Primo de Rivera, also referred to as the Civil Directory (), constitutes the second and last period of the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera in Spain. It was named after the government appointed by Miguel Primo de Rivera in December 1925, which replaced the Military Directory that had held power after the triumph of Primo de Rivera's coup d'état in September 1923. The dictator's purpose was to stabilize his regime "through the creation of a civilian support base". However, the institutionalization project failed and Primo de Rivera presented his resignation to king Alfonso XIII, who had also withdrawn his support, in January 1930, leading to Berenguer's "dictatorship".
Origin of the directorate According to historian Eduardo Gonzalez Calleja, in January 1924, after the definitive dissolution of the parliament in November 1923, "the idea of a provisional dictatorship of a few months' duration was definitively discarded. In April 1925 Primo was already thinking of the constitution of a new Government when the Moroccan matter was settled.
After the landing of Alhucemas, Primo made the decision to constitute what would be known as the "Civil Directory". As the historian Ángeles Barrio has pointed out, "the popularity that the success of the African campaign had given Primo de Rivera allowed him to take a step forward in the continuity of the regime, to return the Army to the barracks and to undertake a civil phase of the directorate. In fact, on December 3, 1925, Primo de Rivera constituted his first civil government, in which, however, the key posts -Presidency, occupied by himself, Vice-Presidency and Interior, by Severiano Martínez Anido, and War by Juan O'Donnell, Duke of Tetuán- were reserved for military personnel. In the same act of presentation of the government, in order to get out of the way of the speculations, more and more insistent in various sectors about the need for a constitutional solution, Primo de Rivera made public his intention to keep the Constitution in abeyance and not to call elections". The objective set by Primo de Rivera to the new civil directorate was to carry out the economic transformation and the preparation of laws by means of which, after a prudential time, a legal normalcy would be reestablished to guide and govern the future political life of Spain.
With the "Civil Directory", Primo de Rivera reestablished the Council of Ministers with the traditional portfolios and with a composition half civilian and half military. The civilians belonged to the Patriotic Union, and among them stood out "the rising stars of corporate authoritarianism: José Calvo Sotelo [a former "maurista" who in the previous two years had occupied the General Directorate of Local Administration] in Finance, Eduardo Aunós in Labor and the Count of Guadalhorce in Public Works". Another prominent minister was the conservative José Yanguas Messía in the State portfolio. However, in the decisions on strictly political matters Primo de Rivera only discussed them with General Martínez Anido.
According to Genoveva García Queipo de Llano, with the appointment of the civil directorate, Primo de Rivera "affirmed his will to remain in power and did not mark any precise way out of the dictatorial regime".
Failed institutionalization of the regime
The first step towards the institutionalization of the regime had been the foundation in April 1924 of the "single party" Patriotic Union and the second the formation of the divil directorate itself. The next steps were the establishment of the National Corporate Organization and the convening of the National Consultative Assembly in charge of drafting a new Constitution.
According to González Calleja, "the convening of the National Consultative Assembly in September 1927 and the elaboration of the draft Constitution marked the definitive break of the dictatorship with the parliamentary system, provisionally suspended four years earlier. Since then, the UP rejected the ideals of the 1876 Constitution and opted for the implementation of a corporative system, accentuating its anti-politicism, its anti-parliamentarism, its anti-religionalism and its centralism".
National Corporate Organization (OCN) and collaboration of the UGT For González Calleja, the dictatorship tried to follow a middle way between free association unionism and the unique and obligatory unionism of totalitarianisms. For this purpose, Primo de Rivera proposed to abolish the class unions in order to replace them with "unions" with mere welfare, educational and disciplinary functions for their members and to act as intermediaries to elect the workers' representatives in the joint committees of the corporations of the different trades and professions that he proposed to create. Primo de Rivera expressed it clearly a few days after the coup d'état was consummated: "Workers' associations, indeed, for purposes of culture, protection and mutualism, and even of healthy politics, but not for resistance and struggle with production".
The culmination of this process took place in November 1926 with the creation of the National Corporate Organization, whose ultimate goal, according to historian Ángeles Barrio, was to guarantee social peace through a policy of intervention in the world of labor ("social corporativism"). The OCN consisted of a first tier formed by joint committees; a second tier constituted by the provincial Mixed Commissions and, finally, a third tier, formed by the corporation councils of each trade, which constituted the highest body. The representation of employers and workers was equal -parity- in each step. The key piece of the OCN were the local Joint Committees whose primary purpose was "to regulate the life of the corresponding profession or group of professionals".
Primo de Rivera offered the representation of the working class in the OCN to the socialist union, the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), which caused a deep division between those in favor of collaborating with the dictatorship, headed by Francisco Largo Caballero, and those against, whose leader was Indalecio Prieto. The former won and the UGT joined the OCN, justifying this with the argument that it did not restrict the right to strike and that it considered the form of election of workers' representatives in the Joint Committees to be democratic. In the OCN, the socialist union occupied around 60% of the workers' representation in the Joint Committees and an even higher percentage in the two upper echelons. However, the increase in UGT membership was only 10%, from 211,000 in 1924 to 235,000 in 1928 -the PSOE went from 8,000 members in 1924 to nearly 13,000 in 1929-.
The system of the Joint Committees considerably reduced labor conflicts, but in the last two years of the dictatorship, as the economic situation worsened, strikes reappeared. The regime's response was to resort to repression, from which the UGT was not spared, as the Government closed 93 of its centers.
For their part, the employers -and the Free Trade Unions- from 1928 onwards began to criticize the OCN as "stateist" and "centralist". By the end of the year, the employers' organizations were already openly against it and called for the dissolution of the Joint Committees or at least their reform so that they would be limited to conciliation and arbitration tasks, and would no longer legislate on labor relations and working conditions. This was how the OCN lost "definitively the support of the conservative classes, who saw in primorriverist paternalism a direct threat to their interests," states Eduardo González Calleja.
Patriotic Union
At the beginning of July 1926 the National Assembly of Patriotic Unions was held in Madrid, where the statutes of the party were approved and the members of the organs of the party, which since its birth in 1924 had not yet been endowed with a structure that went beyond the provincial level, were elected. Primo de Rivera was ratified as National Chief and a National Board of Directors was appointed, and a National Board of Directors, "imitation of the Grand Council of Fascism" according to Eduardo Gonzalez Calleja, composed of the president, the vice president, the secretary general, the 50 provincial chiefs of the UP and 21 people appointed directly by Primo de Rivera. But the truth was that after the Assembly this body only met once, in October 1927. At the provincial and local levels, the same structure was reproduced with a provincial or local Chief, with his corresponding advisory board, half of whose members were elected by him, but in reality those who supervised the provincial organization of the UP continued to be the civil governors who controlled the appointment of the provincial Chief and the local Chiefs.
A few months later, in February 1927, Primo de Rivera ordered the civil governors, a third of whom were members of the UP, to appoint upetists to the positions in the city councils and in the deputations -in October 1928 it was established that they would constitute four fifths-, which was viewed with distrust by some of the most prominent members of the civil directorate such as José Calvo Sotelo and Eduardo Aunós. The latter denounced that "an infinity of elements" of the parties of the turn evicted from power "ran to enlist in the victor's army, because the only thing that interested them was to be always on the rise".
As for the number of affiliates, the maximum was reached in July 1927 with 1,319,428, according to official figures, and from that date on it dropped to between 600,000 and 700,000 by the end of 1929. According to González Calleja, a revealing fact of the "lukewarm reception that the primorriverist mobilizing project had among the Spanish population" was the modest circulation of the UP and the regime's newspaper La Nación (50,000 copies in 1927).
The UP became a mere propaganda instrument of the regime, always ready to obey the orders of its National Chief -such as the multitudinous demonstration held in Madrid on September 13, 1928, in its support-. In February 1929 Primo de Rivera also turned it into a parapolice organization in defense of the regime by attributing to it functions of investigation and information in collaboration with the Somatén, constituting both organizations a sort of "patriotic league". When the draft Constitution presented in July 1929 was rejected, the UP organized a campaign throughout Spain in its defense, which included attacks on the Constitution of 1876, and whose most outstanding act was the great rally held at the Monumental cinema in Madrid in mid-September 1929.
Mobilization and framing of the masses