1920 Spanish Presidential Election

1920 Spanish presidential election

The **1920 Spanish Presidential Election** was held on Thursday December 30, 1920, and was the sixth Spanish presidential election, as well as the last to be held under the first Republic of Spain and the last to be held solely by the Cortes Generales. It was also the first election since 1875 to only be contested by one candidate and the first of a duo of elections in the 1920s to only have one candidate.

Following the 1895 presidential election, incumbent president Francisco Serrano conducted a self coup against the constitution of the first Republic of Spain in order to keep his hold on power, and would remain in power until his death in December 1920. During his presidency, Serrano presided over a descent into authoritarianism and the repression of civil liberties, as well as the collapse of the Spanish Empire amid the Spanish-American war from 1898 onwards. Following the death of Serrano on December 19, 1920, interior minister and Conservative party leader Eduardo Dato assumed the presidency on an acting basis, and made clear his intention for a radical overhaul of the Spanish constitution in order to bring the country back towards a formal democracy.

On December 30, 1920, Dato was elected unanimously by the Cortes Generales to the office of president and was granted a full five year term as president. Within days of his conformation, Dato was confirmed in office by the Cortes Generales, who granted him extraconstitutional powers to radically reform the regime; on January 20, 1921, Dato implemented a new interim constitution which dissolved the first Republic of Spain and replaced it with a new federal republic. Under the new constitution, the powers of the presidency were significantly stripped back and most duties of the office were instead invested in a new position of prime minister, appointed by the president at the recommendation of the Cortes Generales; the new office of prime minister would be the head of government and first in line for succession to the presidency. The new federal republic radically redistributed power in Spain, dividing the country into federated regions with considerable power to reject rulings of the central government, whilst a new constitutional court was established to ensure that no individual could overturn the constitution and establish another dictatorship.

On February 18, 1921, while being driven from the parliament building in Madrid, Dato was shot at by three Catalan anarchists who were riding a motorcycle. Whilst Dato survived the initial attack, the wounds sustained would ultimately prove to be fatal. With his health plummeting between February and March 1921, Dato promoted Antonio Maura and Manuel Allendesalazar within the Conservative party to position them to be his successors as prime minister and party leader respectively; in the evening of March 7, 1921, Maura was appointed as prime minister in what would ultimately be Dato's last act as president. In the morning of March 8, 1921, Eduardo Dato died of his injuries and was succeeded as president by Antonio Maura. Under his successor, Eduardo Dato was given a state funeral and was posthumously recognised as a "founding father" of the republican Spanish state. Dato's federal republic would last until 1940, when it was deposed by Francisco Franco's Nationalist Party.