Miguel Primo de Rivera

**Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja** (January 8, 1880 - March 16, 1940) was a Spanish dictator and military officer who ruled as the eighth president of Spain between June 1930 and December 1931, and briefly held office as prime minister of Spain from June to August 1930. Between 1921 and 1930, Primo de Rivera was minister of defence, having actively served in the armed forces for a total of thirty years.

Primo de Rivera was born into a landowning military family of Jerez de la Frontera. His father was a retired colonel, whilst his uncle was a ranking member of the armed forces and a former member of the nobility. Having studied history and engineering before deciding upon a military career, Primo de Rivera won admission to the newly created General Military Academy in Toledo, and graduated in 1904. Following his graduation, Primo de Rivera's career blossomed, but he became increasingly discouraged with the fortunes of his country. He was wounded in action in October 1911 in the Kert campaign while leading the infantry regiment San Fernando as Colonel. Having returned to the Spanish puppet regime in Morocco, he was promoted to brigadier general in 1911, the first graduate of the General Academy to receive such a promotion. Yet social revolution had flared briefly in Barcelona, during the Tragic Week of 1909. After the army had called up conscripts to fight in the Second Rif War in Morocco, Radical republicans and anarchists in Catalonia had proclaimed a general strike. Violence had erupted when the Serrano dictatorship declared martial law. Anticlerical rioters had burned churches and convents, and tensions grew as socialists and anarchists pressed for radical changes in Spain. The government proved unable to reform itself or the nation and frustration mounted.

Following President Francisco Serrano's death in 1920 and the gradual transition back to democracy, Miguel Primo de Rivera was appointed to government as minister of defence as a reward for publicly endorsing Manuel Allendesalazar's bid for the presidency in 1921. Primo de Rivera's tenure in office coincided with a precipitous rise in civil discontent as radical socialist and anarchist ideas in Catalonia began to spread across the country, aided by President Allendesalazar's flagship programme of railway construction; consequently, Primo de Rivera authorised numerous regional proclamations of martial law in the federal states of Spain and became the personal target of numerous anarchist assassination plots. During the 1925 and 1930 presidential elections, Primo de Rivera utilised the logistical capacity of the Spanish armed forces to conduct a partisan political campaign for the election of the Conservative party presidential nominee. In 1930, Conservative party nominee and prime minister Antonio Maura failed to win election to the presidency and was defeated in a landslide; in response, Primo de Rivera and Maura conspired to undermine the electoral process and refused to certify electoral results in the Cortes Generales.

With no presidential candidate successfully nominated following the 1930 presidential election, lieutenant general Miguel Primo de Rivera conducted an armed coup d'état which saw him assume the presidency at the start of the 1930-35 presidential term on June 11, 1930; under his new military government, Primo de Rivera appointed himself as prime minister and assembled a supreme directorate of eight military men, with himself as leader. He then decreed martial law and fired civilian politicians in the provinces, replacing them with middle-ranking officers. He also moved to repress separatists, who wanted to make the Basque provinces and Catalonia independent from Spain. After reaching an agreement with Conservative party leader Manuel Allendesalazar to provide legislative support for the military's aims, Allendesalazar was appointed as prime minister at the head of a mixed military-civilian government on August 18, 1930. After Allendesalazar's appointment, Primo de Rivera remained largely dominant in government but entered a power-sharing arrangement, with both president and prime minister required to sign off legislation. As resistance to the military-civilian government began to mount, an open rebellion in Catalonia opened in August 1931, prompting prime minister Manuel Allendesalazar to enter into peace negotiations with the opposition Liberal Republican Party to end violence. Consequently, as part of the peace process, Primo de Rivera and Allendesalazar agreed to gradually transfer executive power to elected president Niceto Alcalá-Zamora over the course of a year; on December 10, 1931, Primo de Rivera stepped down as president and was succeeded by Niceto Alcalá-Zamora. After leaving office, Primo de Rivera fled the country and entered into self imposed exile in the Republic of Dunsteen until his death on March 13, 1940.