Historia de una derrota: la trayectoria internacional del Partido Socialista Popular de España (1968-1978)

The text reconstructs the life and death of the spanish Popular Socialist Party, the political creature of Enrique Tierno Galván, from the point of view of its international relations and politics. Born as Asociación por la Unidad Funcional de Europa, and jumped into official politics in1968 under the name of the Socialist Party of the Interior, for twenty years the PSP tried to bring together not only anti-Franco forces in the interior of the country, but also the international socialism; in particular the European one, from whom it expected recognition and help in its fight against the Franco state. The funding from the SPD and the Ebert Foundation, the dialogues with Mário Soãres, Europeanism, Mediterraneanism and anti-Atlanticism, the contacts with the North African and Latin American leftists and the great interrupted dream of Tierno, the Socialist International: this research discovers the threads that for propensity, strategy and search for legitimacy related the PSP with the rest of the world, in the context of rivalry and reciprocal attraction with the PSOE. The story ends with - and somehow prepares for - a great defeat: the electoral failure of 1977, which was the indirect consequence, among other reasons, of the lack of social democratic support so coveted by Tierno, and which led to joining the PSOE in 1978.