The fall of the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera took place on January 28, 1930, when General Miguel Primo de Rivera was forced to present his resignation to the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII, which he accepted, giving way to the Dictablanda of Dámaso Berenguer. The end of the dictatorship was the culmination of a process that began several months earlier.
Historian Genoveva García Queipo de Llano places the beginning of the crisis of the dictatorship in mid-1928, when several factors converged: the worsening of the dictator's diabetes, which shortly after leaving power would lead to his death; the failure of the dictatorship to establish a new regime; and the growing role of the opposition, which was joined by a sector of the Army that organized several armed conspiracies against the regime. Ángeles Barrio Alonso situates it slightly earlier, at the end of 1927, when with the constitution of the National Consultative Assembly it became clear that Primo de Rivera, in spite of the fact that from the beginning he had presented his regime as "temporary", had no intention of returning to the situation prior to the coup d'état of September 1923.
For his part, Alejandro Quiroga delays the beginning of the crisis to January 1929 when the insurrection led by José Sánchez Guerra took place and, despite its failure, "managed to show the cracks in a regime with less support than it claimed". "Certainly, until the beginning of 1929 there was nothing to indicate that the primorriverist regime was in crisis", adds Alejandro Quiroga. Francisco Alía Miranda agrees with Quiroga: "Since the January 1929 uprising, things were never the same again for the dictatorship. Primo de Rivera himself would confess it after his resignation to the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación: "...they gave me the discouraging impression that the Army, that with so much correctness, loyalty and citizenship had been on the side of the dictatorship, was distancing itself from it".
Loss of support: rupture of the "alliance of 1923" The social and political sectors that had initially lent their support to the dictatorship —forming the "alliance of 1923", as Shlomo Ben-Ami called it— gradually withdrew their support: the peripheral nationalisms when the dictatorship failed to fulfill its promise of "decentralization" and ended up dissolving the Mancomunitat of Catalonia; the business organizations dissatisfied with the UGT's increased influence in labor relations —"the UGT strengthened its organizations and began to extend them to agriculture, which subverted the traditional relations between day laborers and employers in the countryside. In the cities, where small and medium-sized employers were dominant, the rise of union power translated into obligations with respect to schedules, hierarchies of trades, definition of tasks and salaries to which they were not accustomed", states Santos Juliá; the intellectual and university sectors that abandoned their "benevolent expectations", disillusioned with their conservative "regenerationism"; various liberal social and political groups that saw how the dictatorship intended to perpetuate itself in power, failing to fulfill its promise of being a "temporary regime"; etc. Likewise, the progressive loss of social and political support caused the king, according to Santos Juliá, to begin "to consider that perhaps the Crown ran some risk if it continued to be tied to the figure of the dictator".
Employers The protectionist and interventionist economic policy of the dictatorship harmed the interests of certain economic sectors which therefore gradually withdrew their support. This was the case of the owners of the commercialized agricultural sector who complained about the policy of high tariffs because it harmed the exports of oil, wine and oranges —this was expressed, for example, by the Chamber of Commerce of Valencia as early as October 1923—. Or that of the merchants, since the protectionist policy meant high prices in the domestic market, limiting their volume of activity and reducing their profits —however, Primo de Rivera blamed them for the rise in prices, blaming it on the "excessive luxury" of their stores—.
Small and medium-sized enterprises also protested against the interventionist policy which they considered to be aimed at favoring the large and monopolistic companies and also harmed the consumer because "free competition is an indispensable condition for a better quality and cheaper production", as the Superior Council of Chambers of Commerce, Industry and Navigation stated at the end of 1925, and reiterated at the beginning of 1929: "The government has long since abandoned its harmonizing function. It now invades a field which, due to the natural demands of economic life, should remain closed to any official intervention". The Confederación Gremial Española, the association of small producers which had enthusiastically supported Primo de Rivera's coup, also criticized "the actions of the regulatory committees of national production" and "the granting of monopolies, of whatever kind", since "only with absolute freedom in the establishment of business will individual initiative be stimulated and the improvement of production be pushed forward".
The increase in taxes, an "obstacle to the normal development of production", according to the employers, and the measures against tax fraud, such as the obligation to keep a "daily book of sales", were also the object of protests. One employers' organization complained that it was "a constant nightmare for traders and industrialists to be presented as the only tax fraudsters", despite the fact that they were the ones who had received the full "weight of the tax reform". The large companies also complained about the high taxes and in 1929 they also began to criticize the interventionist economic policy, which had benefited them so much until then, because of the tax burden it entailed.
Employers and businessmen were even more opposed to the regime's social policy, which, according to them, had "multiplied the advantages of social legislation" and was being carried out at their expense, as they were forced to pay more taxes to finance it. The Joint Committees of the National Corporate Organization were the object of a harsh campaign against them on the part of the employers' associations which demanded their elimination or their reform, a campaign in which the conservative and Catholic press took an active part, especially when these sectors perceived that the great beneficiaries of the corporate system, which they had always defended, were not the Free Trade Unions but the socialists of the UGT. The employers complained that the Joint Committees were not bodies exclusively dedicated to conciliation and arbitration, but that they dealt with matters which until then had been the exclusive monopoly of the employers, such as, for example, discipline or the organization of work. They went so far as to say that in the joint committees "the most serious class struggle in our history is currently taking place". The Minister of Labor Eduardo Aunós replied that the joint committees were a key instrument in Primo de Rivera's "revolution from above", the only one that could avoid "a catastrophic and anarchic revolution from below", whose main victims would be the propertied classes.
Army: artillery rebellion and coup d'état attempts The unity shown by the Army during Primo de Rivera's coup d'état, as soon as he obtained the King's support, was not maintained for long and "in fact, the opposition of important sectors of the Army was one of the determining factors in Primo's fall", pointed out Alejandro Quiroga. "When the social order was no longer immediately threatened, the Moroccan problem had been solved and the king began to show unequivocal signs of disliking the dictatorship, a growing alienation of the armed forces from Primo de Rivera became evident", affirmed Shlomo Ben-Ami. According to Eduardo Gonzalez Calleja, the military policy of the dictatorship had a great influence in this, which "turned out to be chaotic and contradictory" as could be seen in the question of Morocco —first defending the "abandonista" position, supported by the military junteros and questioned by the military Africanists, and then the interventionist one, defended by the Africanists and criticized by the juniors— and in the promotion policy, turned into "the reign of contradiction and arbitrariness". An opinion shared by José Luis Gómez Navarro: "From September 1925 onwards, all the military policy of the dictatorship, from the development of the war in Morocco with the landing of Al Hoceima to the changes in the promotion systems, meant the triumph of the spirit and the model of the Africanist army over this of the junteros, reopening and aggravating this confrontation".
The management of promotions had always been a very controversial issue, especially in the Infantry, since the junteros defended that only seniority should be taken into account, while the Africanists supported war merits. Progressively, the dictatorship took control of the Board of Classification of Generals and Colonels, so it was Primo de Rivera who ultimately decided the promotions, rewarding the like-minded military and punishing the critics. A Royal Decree of July 4, 1926, established that it was not necessary to communicate the reasons why certain chiefs and officers had not been promoted and furthermore denied them any possibility of appeal. The resulting arbitrariness in promotions —which became evident especially after the landing of Al Hoceima in which a flood of promotions for war merits took place— motivated the distancing of some chiefs and officers who began to conspire against the dictatorship by contacting politicians of the parties of the turn dislodged from power. "Many of the memoirs and political works written by military officers during these and later years reveal personal grievances, rather than an anti-dictatorial militancy based on deep ideological convictions", said Gonzalez Calleja. "The concentration of power in the hands of the Marquis of Estella (something habitual in his way of governing) and his arbitrariness when exercising it (also a classic primorriverista), decreeing dazzling promotions within the Army, generally of Africanists, led numerous generals and colonels to gradually position themselves against the dictator", emphasized Alejandro Quiroga.
In this context of internal confrontations, on February 20, 1927, it was decreed the reestablishment of the General Military Academy, which had already existed in Toledo between 1882 and 1893, with the aim, not only of improving the training of the officers, but also of reestablishing "the unity of the military family by promoting comradeship", according to Eduardo González Calleja. This same historian interprets the appointment of General Franco as its director "as a gesture of reconciliation with the Africanists, achieved after the operations of the summer of 1925". Alejandro Quiroga makes a similar assessment: "The appointment of Francisco Franco as director of the General Military Academy of Zaragoza only confirmed the Africanist bias of the dictator in the eyes of many peninsular chiefs and officers close to the Juntas". Javier Moreno Luzón and José Luis Gómez-Navarro also agree.