Lerroux, Alejandro

Lerroux, Alejandro

(älāhän`drō lāro͞o`), 1864–1949, Spanish politician. He first won prominence as a radical and virulently anticlerical demagogue in Barcelona. However, he gradually moved to the right politically. Under the second republic (1931–36) he held various cabinet positions and was several times premier from 1933 to 1935. In Oct., 1934, his government suppressed a miners' uprising in Asturias and a Catalan separatist revolt. A financial scandal forced his resignation in 1935. He fled to Portugal after the outbreak (1936) of civil war, but was allowed to return to Spain in 1947.

Lerroux, Alejandro

 

Born 1864, in La Rambla; died June 27, 1949, in Madrid. Spanish statesman and politician.

Early in the 20th century Lerroux was active in the republican movement in Catalonia. He initially joined its left wing; later he shifted to the right. In 1911 he founded the Radical Republican Party. He was a member of the “Revolutionary Committee” created in 1930 at a conference of leaders of the bourgeois Republicans and Socialists. In 1931, Lerroux was minister of foreign affairs in the republican government. From 1933 to 1935 he headed a number of rightist governments. Between 1936 and 1947 he lived abroad. He was the author of memoirs entitled A Short History (1945).