Maria Christina of Austria was regent of Spain from the death of her husband, Alfonso XII, in November 1885 until their son, Alfonso XIII, turned sixteen and swore the Constitution of 1876 in May 1902. Queen Maria Christina was pregnant when her husband died and gave birth to King Alfonso XIII in May 1886.
According to historian Manuel Suárez Cortina, "the Regency was a particularly significant period in the history of Spain, because in those years at the end of the century the system experienced its stabilization, the development of liberal policies, but also the appearance of great fissures that in the international arena were reflected first in the colonial war, and later with the United States, causing the military and diplomatic defeat that led to the loss of the colonies after the Treaty of Paris in 1898. In the domestic sphere, the Spanish society underwent a considerable mutation, with the appearance of such significant political realities as the emergence of regionalisms and peripheral nationalisms, the strengthening of a workers' movement of double affiliation, socialist and anarchist, and the sustained persistence, although decreasing, of the republican and Carlist oppositions".
The death of Alfonso XII and the "pact of El Pardo"
On November 25, 1885, the young King Alfonso XII died of tuberculosis and his wife Maria Christina of Austria assumed the regency, "a young woman, foreigner, with little time in Spain, not very popular and with a reputation of being not very intelligent". In addition to the weakness in which the highest institution of the State seemed to be left, there was the fact that, while waiting for a third childbirth because the Queen was pregnant, there was no male heir —Alfonso and María Christina, married on November 29, 1879, had had two daughters—. Thus the death of Alfonso XII created a certain vacuum of power— Menéndez Pelayo wrote to Juan Valera who was in Washington: "The death of the king has produced here a singular stupor and uncertainty. No one can guess what will happen"—. This could be taken advantage of by the Carlists or the Republicans to put an end to the Restoration regime. In fact, in September 1886, only four months after the birth of Alfonso XIII, there was a republican uprising led by General Manuel Villacampa del Castillo and organized from exile by Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla, which constituted the last military attempt of republicanism and whose failure deeply divided it.
To face the situation of uncertainty created by the death of the king and through the mediation of General Martínez Campos, the leaders of the two parties of the time, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo for the Conservative Party and Práxedes Mateo Sagasta for the Liberal-Fusionist Party, met to agree on the replacement of the former by the latter at the head of the government. The so-called "Pacto del Pardo" —although the interview took place in the seat of the Presidency of the Government and not in the Palacio del Pardo— included the "benevolence" of the Conservatives with respect to the new Liberal government of Sagasta. However, the faction of the Conservative Party headed by Francisco Romero Robledo did not accept the cession of power to the liberals and left the party to form one of its own, called the Liberal-Reformist Party, which was joined by José López Domínguez's Izquierda Dinástica, in an attempt to create an intermediate political space between the two parties of the turn.
Cánovas del Castillo justified the Pact of El Pardo in the Congress of Deputies months later:The conviction was born in me that it was necessary for the fierce struggle that we monarchist parties were engaged in at the time... to cease in any case, and to cease for quite some time. I thought that a truce was indispensable and that all monarchists should rally around the Monarchy. [And once I had thought of this... what was it up to me to do? After having been in government for almost two years and having governed most of the reign of Alfonso XII, was it up to me to speak to the parties and tell them: 'because the country is in this crisis, do not fight me anymore; let us make peace around the throne; let me be able to defend and support myself? That would have been absurd and, besides being ungenerous and dishonest, it would have been ridiculous. Since I stood up to propose concord and to ask for a truce, there was no other way to make people believe in my sincerity but to remove myself from power.In June, the various liberal factions had reached an agreement, known as the law of guarantees, which made it possible to reestablish the unity of the party. It had been drawn up by Manuel Alonso Martínez, representing the fusionists, and Eugenio Montero Ríos, representing the leftists, and consisted of developing the freedoms and rights recognized during the democratic Sexenio —universal suffrage, trial by jury and so on— in exchange for the acceptance of shared sovereignty between the king and the Parliament, on which the Constitution of 1876 was based, meaning that the last word in the exercise of sovereignty would be held by the Crown and not by the electorate. Left out of the liberal-fusionist party was the faction led by General López Domínguez, to whom Sagasta offered the ambassadorship in Paris, but he demanded a minimum of 27 deputies in the new Parliament, which was considered an excessive number.
Sagasta's "Long Parliament" (1885–1890)
In April 1886, five months after forming the government and one month before the birth of the future Alfonso XIII, the liberals called elections to provide themselves with a solid majority in the Cortes and thus be able to develop their government program, although they had already been able to begin to implement it thanks to the benevolence of the conservatives. This period was called the Long Government of Sagasta or also the Long Parliament, since they were the longest lasting Cortes of the Restoration and the only ones that were about to exhaust their legal life, but it was not easy for Sagasta to keep his party and his government united, since during those five years he had to overcome several crises.
During this period "a set of reforms were carried out that definitively configured the social and political profile of the Restoration as a historical epoch", which is why some historians have considered it the "most fruitful period" of the Restoration.
Political and legal reforms
The first great reform of the Long Government of Sagasta was the approval in June 1887 of the Law of Associations which regulated freedom of association for the purposes of "human freedom" and which allowed workers' organizations to act legally, since it included trade union freedom, giving a great boost to the workers' movement in Spain. Under the protection of the new law, the anarcho-syndicalist FTRE, founded in 1881 as the successor to the FRE-AIT of the Sexenio Democrático, spread, and the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) was born, founded in 1888, the same year in which the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), born in hiding nine years earlier, was able to hold its First Congress.
The second major reform was the jury law, an old demand of progressive liberalism that had always been resisted by conservatism, and which was approved in April 1888. Trial by jury was established for those crimes that had the greatest impact on the maintenance of social order or that affected individual rights, such as freedom of the press. According to the law, the jury would be in charge of establishing the proven facts, while the legal qualification of the facts would correspond to the judges.
The third major reform was the introduction of universal (male) suffrage by means of a law passed on June 30, 1890. However, the law was not the result of popular pressure in favor of the extension of suffrage, but what Sagasta achieved with its approval was to ensure the unity of the party and the government, satisfying a historical demand of democratic liberalism at a time when the pressure of the "gamacistas" was increasing in favor of approving a protectionist tariff for cereal production. A second reason was the strengthening of the liberal party —and of the Restoration regime— with the incorporation into it of Emilio Castelar's "posibilists" republicans, as they had promised if the extension of suffrage was approved.
However, the approval of suffrage for all males over twenty-five years of age —some five million in 1890—, regardless of their income, as was the case with census suffrage, did not mean the democratization of the political system, because electoral fraud was maintained —thanks to the caciquismo, as it was said at the time—, only that now the cacique networks were extended to the whole population, so that the governments continued to be formed before the elections, and not after, since the government of the day was manufactured with the encasillado of a solid majority in the Parliament—during the Restoration no government ever lost an election—.
According to Carlos Dardé, the ultimate reason for this "lack of mobilizing effects of universal suffrage in political life... was the social condition —economic and cultural— of the new voters, and their political horizon. The immense majority, male, to whom the right to vote had been given was not composed of middle and working classes of urban character, or independent peasants, involved in a political project of democratic character, but of rural masses, extremely poor and illiterate, completely alien to that project, with the hope of a social revolution, in the southern half of the country, and of the triumph of Carlism, in a good part of the north; masses which, in addition, had experienced either a strong police repression or the defeat in a civil war".
Thus, "although formally it amounted to the establishment of democracy, [the approval of universal (male) suffrage] in practical terms nothing changed". "The deputies remained, more or less, the same; no social group, with few exceptions, gained access to legislative power. Nor was there any transformation of the party structure, which continued to be parties of notables; no base organization was promoted to attract the vote of the citizens whose electoral rights had just been recognized". Furthermore, the Constitution was not reformed, so the principle of national sovereignty was still not recognized, and only one third of the Senate was elected —the freedom of worship, another of the principles of a democratic system, was not recognized either—.