Turno

In Spanish politics, the turnismo, turno pacífico or simply turno (Spanish for "turn" or "shift") refers to an informal two-party system of government within the constitutional monarchy of the Restoration. It consisted of the alternation in government of the two dynastic parties (the Conservative and the Liberal parties) through systematic electoral fraud which ensured that the party that called the elections always won.

The system was in place from 1879, the first elections held under the Restoration, until 1918, when it began to break down in response to public influence during World War I, and was ultimately abandoned after the election of 1923 and coup d'etat of Miguel Primo de Rivera.

Background

Under the constitutional monarchy of the Bourbon Restoration, government formation required the support of the Crown, and elections were called only in response to a political crisis or the erosion of power of the ruling party. Only two major political parties governed Spain under the Restoration: the Liberal Conservative Party, representing the "right" of the system, and the Liberal Fusionist Party, representing its "left".

The Conservative Party was led by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the architect of turnismo, and the Liberal Party was led by Práxedes Mateo Sagasta. The two men divided between them all of the political factions which supported the constitutional monarchy, excluding Carlists and republicans, who both rejected the political system, and socialists and anarchists, who rejected the principles of liberty and property on which Spanish bourgeois society was based.

The first alternation took place in February 1881, when the Liberal Party was called to power after six years of conservative government. In this instance, the transfer of power came at the behest of Alfonso XII, without consultation with Cánovas and against his presumed wishes. According to historian José Ramón Milán García, "its relevance did not escape its protagonists, aware that the monarch's initiative opened the doors to overcoming the entrenched confrontation between left-wing liberalism and the Bourbon dynasty, and therefore the Cainite struggles sustained for decades between the various houses of Spanish liberalism." Historian Carlos Dardé noted that the 1881 election made clear "that the ultimate interpreter of the state of affairs, and the one who had the power to make decisions―over and above the parliamentary majorities and the president of the government―was the monarch."

In response to the 1881 transfer of power, Cánovas formulated a system of rules "that both parties would have to respect in order to avoid falling again into the danger of royal whims.