Full Description
A political strategy adopted by communist parties in 1935, on Comintern instruction, to form alliances with socialist and liberal parties against fascism. In France and Spain, Popular Fronts won elections in 1936. The Spanish Popular Front government was the legitimate authority the Republic defended during the Civil War. The strategy represented a significant shift from the communist parties’ earlier “class against class” line, which had labelled social democrats as “social fascists.”
Critical Perspective
The Popular Front strategy has been debated ever since. Communist parties argued it was necessary to unite against fascism; critics on the left argued it subordinated working-class interests to bourgeois democratic alliances. In Spain, Communist Party insistence on prioritising military order over social revolution — and the NKVD’s suppression of revolutionary forces — ensured that even if the Republic had won the war, the social revolution many of its supporters sought would have been crushed.
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