Alejandro Lerroux

Alejandro Lerroux García (4 March 1864 – 25 June 1949) was a Spanish politician who was the leader of the Radical Republican Party. He served as Prime Minister three times from 1933 to 1935 and held several cabinet posts as well. A highly charismatic politician, he was distinguished by his demagogical and populist political style.

Founder and leader of the Radical Republican Party (PRR), he was a controversial politician from the beginning, being especially known for his demagogic rhetoric. With a workerist, anticlerical discourse and diametrically opposed to the incipient Catalan nationalism, during his first political stage he became a prominent political leader in Barcelona. Later he would adopt more moderate positions, having a prominent role in the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic. Faced with the Manuel Azaña governments during the so-called "reformist" biennium, from September 1933 he would assume the presidency of the Council of Ministers and became one of the main arbiters of the political situation during the conservative biennium of 1934–1935.

His turn to the right, however, led his party to suffer several splits; His image was also badly damaged among the public by a succession of corruption scandals that became public at the end of 1935. After the collapse of the Radical Party in the 1936 elections, Lerroux disappeared from the political scene. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he went into exile in Portugal.

He was initiated as Freemason around 1886 in Madrid's Vetonica lodge of the Grand Orient of Spain, but his activity was limited, among other reasons due to his disillusion with the prospects this membership offered to his immediate purposes.

Lerroux agitated as a young man in the ranks of the radical republicans, as a follower of Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla. He practised a demagogic and aggressive journalistic style in the diverse publications that he directed (El País, El Progreso, El Intransigente and El Radical).

From the 1890s onwards Lerroux radicalized his discourse. His populist and anticlerical speeches, as well as his intervention in diverse campaigns against the governments of the Restoration, made him very popular among workers in Barcelona, who later constituted the base of a loyal electorate. A prominent anti-catalanist, he became known as the "Emperor of the Paralelo". In 1898 and 1899, he organized through his newspapers a campaign for the judicial review of the Montjuic trial in which forced confessions through torture had led to the execution of some of the suspects for the 1896 Barcelona Corpus Christi procession bombing. This contributed to his rise as a left-wing political force in Barcelona.

In 1906, Lerroux rallied his followers with the following exhortation: "Young barbarians of today: enter and sack the decadent civilization of this unhappy country, destroy its temples, finish off its gods, tear the veil from its novices and raise them up to be mothers to virilize the species, break into the records of property and make bonfires of its papers that fire may purify the infamous social organization. Enter its humble hearths and raise the legions of proletarians that the world may tremble before their awakened judges. Do not be stopped by altars nor by tombs. Fight, kill, die."

He was elected as a member of the Congress of Deputies for the first time in 1901 and again in 1903 and 1905, as a member of the Republican Union that he had helped to form with Nicolás Salmerón. The defection of Salmerón to the Catalan Solidarity coalition in 1906 led Lerroux to form the Radical Republican Party (1908) and headed the struggle against increasing Catalan nationalism. There is some evidence that both Francisco Ferrer and Lerroux may have participated in the hatching of two different plots to assassinate king Alfonso XIII in 1905 and 1906. He had to go into exile on several occasions, first to escape condemnation dictated by one of his articles (1907) and later fleeing from governmental repression in response to the Tragic Week in Barcelona (1909).