Party Crisis

Abstract

The organisational developments described in the previous chapter could not prevent the UCD’s ultimate collapse. The party’s failure to institutionalise can be explained in terms of the prolonged internal crisis it suffered after the 1979 elections. The process of party building was compromised by the increasingly fractious behaviour of the UCD elite, and the crisis of authority suffered by the party leader Adolfo Suarez. In this chapter, conflict within the party elite is explained in terms of the ideological and political divisions between its component groups, the decline of the leadership’s control over political resources, and the environmental pressures facing the UCD in office.