The CEDA received the most votes in the 1933 elections, winning 115 seats in the new Cortes. The radicals won 104 seats, but after two years in opposition, the party had won only ten seats more than in the elections for the Constituent Cortes. Acción Republicana, Manuel Azaña's party, lost 23 of the 28 seats it had obtained in 1931, and the socialists went down from 115 to 58 seats. In all, the non-republican right went from 40 seats in 1931 to 200 in 1933, and the left from 250 to around a hundred. It was a highly fragmented parliament, with twenty-one groups represented and a good many new deputies: over 60 per cent of the radicals were in this category and only ten CEDA deputies had had previous parliamentary experience. With these results, it was going to be hard to establish a stable coalition.

Alcalá Zamora asked Lerroux to form a ‘purely republican’ government of the centre, which would not include leftist republicans, with whom Lerroux had broken back in December 1931, or the CEDA, which had failed to declare publicly its adherence to the Republic. The veteran leader of the Partido Radical thought that a parliamentary alliance with the CEDA would ensure a majority, and therefore governability, and would enable this ‘accidentalist’ right to be incorporated into the Republic, isolating the monarchist extreme right.