The 1931 Constitution and Agrarian Reform in Spain
The Courts approved a new constitution, the first truly democratic one in Spanish history and the first in Europe. The Constitution was a parliamentary monarchy with a strict separation of powers. Legislative action corresponded exclusively to the Courts, and executive power to the King, but his powers were very limited, as the government was exercised by the ministers. Moreover, they had to answer for their actions to the Courts. Judicial power was reserved for judges.
The text included a detailed bill of rights, with the following rights standing out. It included freedom, inviolability of domicile, voting rights, freedom of residence, freedom of teaching, expression, assembly, and association. However, these last rights and collective rights had limitations, characteristic of bourgeois liberal constitutionalism. Meanwhile, the issue of religion was the subject of intense discussions. The Courts approved freedom of worship, which was opposed by moderates and Carlists, and also State commitments to maintain the Catholic cult and clergy, against the opinion of the Republicans. The Constitution affirmed universal suffrage and, therefore, full national sovereignty.
Electors, male and over twenty-five years old, directly elected the Congress, but the Senate remained a elitist chamber and its composition was chosen indirectly. Municipalities and county councils would also be democratically elected.
The situation of hungry peasants, especially in Andalusia and Extremadura, had been addressed with urgent measures by the Interim Government. Obligatory cultivation of uncultivated lands was decreed, and preferential hiring of day laborers from surrounding villages was mandated. But both the Republican left and the socialists knew that land reform was essential if they wanted to finally end the hunger and the historical backwardness of the country. The reform was to settle farmers on land in estates that were badly exploited or uncultivated, considered causes of major peasant poverty. The most radical demanded the expropriation and distribution of land to laborers, with or without compensation. Others simply proposed the settlement of rural families on the land, but not touching the right of ownership.
After four months of debate, the bill was finally passed, amid peasant pressure, organized by the CNT and PCE in Andalusia and Extremadura, and resistance from right-wing organizations in the National Association of landowners. The Law of Bases for Agrarian Reform of September 1932 affected all of Andalusia, Extremadura, La Mancha, and Salamanca. It declared the expropriation of native lands, the uncultivated or poorly cultivated lands, and leased parts of estates whose owners had more than 1,000 pesetas of cadastral income. The Reform Institute of Agraria (IRA) was established to make an inventory of expropriated land and had an annual budget to compensate the owners. Although the law was timid about what unions and labor parties demanded, in the late Spanish countryside it meant a revolution, and as such was rejected by the employers and the parties of the right. But its implementation was a failure. It took almost a year to complete the record of properties and organize the IRA, and the limited budget allowed just a few farms to be expropriated. By 1934, only 12,000 families had been settled. The resistance of the owners, who resorted to every form of media and evasion for the application of the law, was another motive. This result further irritated a disappointed farmer, the left-wing government, and rising unemployment.