Introduction

Like many democratic organisations in Spain, political parties in the past often experienced a precarious existence. For long periods, they were either outlawed or saw their activities severely curtailed. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the political scene was dominated by the military, which conferred upon itself the right to intervene in political life whenever it judged that stability was threatened. From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the 1970s, neither democracy itself nor political parties in particular had the most favourable opportunities to take root; prior to the post-Franco era, the party system was subject to severe economic, social and political pressures that prevented it from establishing and consolidating itself as it had done in other countries of western Europe.

After the Civil War, Franco abolished all political parties, except his own subservient National Movement which was an amalgam of loyal right-wing groups (1.1.2). With the exception of the PSOE, the PCE, the PNV and the ERC (tables 10.1 and 10.pp. 188 and 208), all the parties that had occupied the political stage in the 1930s sank without trace. However, in the wake of the Political Reform Law of 1976 (1.1.4), there occurred a veritable explosion of political parties, at national and regional level, all eager to participate in the first democratic elections for over forty years, scheduled for 15 June 1977.