The elections held in November 1933 ended in a smashing defeat for the parties of the Left. The Left Republicans were almost annihilated. Of the 120 deputies that had sat in the previous Cortes, they managed to keep but a bare half dozen. Azaña himself only obtained a seat through the good will of Prieto, and the largest of their groups, the Radical Socialists, got no seats at all. The Socialist party also did badly: its numbers dropped from 116 to 58, though it maintained and even increased its strength in Madrid. The Catalan Esquerra declined from 46 to 19, whilst its rival, the Lliga, mopped up the seats it had lost. The Radicals increased their following slightly, so that, as they usually voted with the Lliga, the Centre block can be said to have gone up by 30. But the chief gainers from this landslide were the Right: their numbers leaped up from 42 to 207. Spain seemed to be turning against the Republic.

The swing of the pendulum had not, however, been nearly so violent as these figures would suggest. The new election law had been devised to favour the formation of two main groups in the Cortes, in imitation of the English party system: voting was for lists of candidates and parties which combined to form a united front obtained a great advantage over those that did not. The side which was victorious at the polls was further given a representation in the Cortes that was out of all proportion to its voting figure. In this election the Right had presented a united front and the Left had not. Thus it happened that, although the Right obtained twice as many seats in the Cortes as the Left, the number of votes cast for it was actually less than those cast for the disunited Left parties.