What if the Spanish Civil War had been avoided?

This thread got into a debate about whether the Republic winning the Spanish Civil War would have been even worse than Franco winning, which made me think about a different what-if? The Popular Front’s victory in the 1936 election was very close. No doubt that added to conservative resentment, but it might also have inspired the generals, if they slowed down a bit, to consider that, if it’s that close, the people might come to their senses next election; so, let’s wait and not rebel just yet.

What then? Without the disruption of a civil war, does the predominantly Anarcho-Syndicalists Spanish Revolution happen at all? (Another what-if thread on that here.) Does the Popular Front government get anything done? It had a lot of factions – they could work together to win elections, but in our timeline, once in power they fought each other tooth and nail even while they were fighting Franco. Of course, again, possibly because a civil-war environment had disrupted and degraded things to the point where such fighting was thinkable. If they could actually work together, what would they do? And what does happen next election?

Whenever communists took over any country, things tended to go bad in a hurry. When they start seizing private property, people begin to panic. Business, trade, and transportation start to break down. Typically there were shortages of food and medicine and other necessities, at least in some places. It’s just a bad situation all around.

IANASCW historian, but I stop myself from the reliable fall-back of “it was bound to happen, given the economic disparities, anciently entrenched Right vs the radical, untested theories of the Left, etc. etc.” with one big “what if”

What if the post-Versailles allies had had their shit together, and put a cordon sanitaire around the mess? Everything I’ve read claims that the turning point was when the Germans flew Franco’s troops up from North Africa.

Another what-if: what if the US Navy had been careful not to let the USS Maine’s coal spontaneous combust right next to it’s ammunition stores. The Portuguese colonial empire was just as easily pickings, but they were left alone, and didn’t go on to become Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin’s playground.

But the Popular Front was not solidly Communist.

Communists may have taken over, that’s a possibility, but at the time fascists took over, and fascist dictatorships were hardly a a picnic either, the Republic was a democracy. Nothing actually tells us it wouldn’t have continued as a democracy.

And the Communists took over because everybody else did nothing. If you play by the rules and your opponent doesn’t, you’re likely to get screwed. So, if the only guys who help you actively doesn’t also play by the rules, you’re more likely to listen to them, to continue receiving the help.

No, the Communists took over because the other PF factions did plenty but the Communists were stronger and, more importantly, were in a position to get military help from Stalin. With no Civil War, that reason does not apply.

The Civil War radicalized the political conflict and brought in outside intervention. Without the war, it would have been a political battle between conservatives and socialists rather than an actual battle between fascists and communists.

I see three possible outcomes based on which faction was in power:

  1. If the conservatives won they probably would have stayed neutral in the war but supported Germany and Italy. It’s possible Spain may have joined the Axis as a minor ally like Hungary or Romania.
  2. If the socialists won, you’d have had a leftist anti-fascist government in power and they would have supported France against Germany. As a result, Hitler probably would have put them on his enemies list and invaded Spain after France in 1940.
  3. In the unlikely event, the communists took over, they would have followed the Moscow party line. They would have opposed Germany up to the point of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and then declared neutrality. Then when Germany turned on the Soviet Union in 1941, they would have jumped back. An Axis invasion of Spain probably would have resulted.

The Portuguese empire would have been a lot less tempting to the United States. Spain had colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific - areas where America was already interested in. Portugal’s colonies were in Africa and Asia and America had no major interests in those places.

I wasn’t talking about the other factions on the Republican side, like The POUM or the Anarcho-syndicalists. I was talking about other countries, like France and Great Britain who did nothing to help the Republicans. The only country that helped them was the pariah Soviet Union, so, of course, Communists would be listened to (if they wanted to receive weapons).

The Communists didn’t take over. At the time of Casado’s coup d’etat Spain was a constitutional Democracy with multiple parties, as shaky as it was. The ones who took over were the Fascists.

This shows you totally misunderstand the causes of the military uprising. Conservative resentment because they lost by a narrow margin? Come on!! The military decided to take charge because for years the country had been rife with violence, chaos and disorder and was just getting worse. Not because the results of any election. Your OP totally misunderstands the problem.

And to call the Republican government a “democracy” only works for very, very, loose definitions of “democracy”. There was violence and absolute insecurity everywhere. The government was not in control. Plus, the government had the power to close newspapers and punish people with fines or prison without any legal process. And they used it. To call that a “democracy” in the modern, usual sense of the word is a joke.

Yeah. There were in fights between different groups and factions. Some of which were the ones behind the uprising.

True, transitional periods when changing a system are always rough. We were hardly the only case. And it was a democracy in any definition, or at least as much as a democracy as any other at the time.

Again, without a civil war, none of that applies.

You make pre-Civil-War Spain look like Somalia is today. I’m sure it was nothing like that.

While probably quite a bit shittier than most other European countries, as usual, at the very least was infinitely better than during and after the Civil War. So if the intent of the Coup was to stop a bad situation, it’s safe to say that it failed miserably.

AIUI, the Communist (that is, Soviet-aligned) faction of the PF government took over during the civil war, and marginalized/suppressed the other factions.

While the Popular Front was a mish-mash of several left-leaning parties, hardly consolidated enough to be aligned with anybody, after the start of the Spanish Civil War there wasn’t a common government to be taken.

There was a certain soviet influence in the PF, but it was hardly a prominent one: Azaña, for instance, was not sympathetic to the cause of communism and if anything he had repressed brutally Communist insurgence in the past.