Rodolfo Llopis and the crisis of the PSOE in 1972. His version in the correspondence with Andrés Saborit

Abstract

The seventies were the years of the renovation of the PSOE. Since the 1970 congress the crisis that began to appear in the 1960s started to crystallise, and it first exploded in the UGT congress in 1971 and definitively in the congress of the party in 1972. The struggle between continuity and rupture, exterior and interior, would lean towards the latter in the Suresnes congress in 1974, but the crisis started many years before. The letters of the then Secretary General of the PSOE, Rodolfo Llopis, to Andrés Saborit, which we analyse here, are a valuable finding that adds to the historiography a conclusive contribution: the stagnant PSOE leaders in exile were not ready to make the PSOE a party and a useful organization to Spain, a country that was going to face the democratization after the death of the dictator. The renovation of the party was not only made without them, but against them and despite them, as shown by the correspondence between Llopis and Saborit.