Fake Government
Liberal, middle-class peoples’ attempts to befriend the workers and peasants had failed after some time, spurring them to join the landowners and aristocrats. The few people who did preach the old beliefs in liberty and the idea of unity were ignored. From 1875 until 1917, a fake system of government was in place, operated by the landowners. It was democratic only on paper, and it was in some ways worse that a dictatorship; in this government, two parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals, took it in turns to rule the country. Political leaders in each district regularly faked election results so that seventy seats were always won by the Opposition. Periodically the other party took over after ‘winning’ the election. Spaniards at the beginning of the twentieth century described these parliaments and the way they were elected as ‘two infamous jokes’[1]. It made the people distrust democracy and turn to anarchism, a violent ‘solution’. Normal political groups found it hard to gain recruits because they believed in free elections. In a time of government corruption, progress was almost impossible and the decades which the ‘two infamous jokes’ ruled were terrible propagators of already extant Spanish issues.