10 December 1931, Alcalá-Zamora was elected president by 362 votes out of the 410 deputies present (the Chamber was composed of 446 deputies). In 1933, he dissolved the Cortes (parliament), which cost Alcalá-Zamora critical support on the part of the left. The subsequent elections of November 1933 gave victory to the right to which Alcalá-Zamora was very hostile, with constant institutional confrontations throughout its term in office. The party with the highest number of votes was the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), but it did not have enough seats to govern on its own. Alcalá-Zamora refused to appoint the CEDA leader José María Gil-Robles as prime minister and instead appointed Alejandro Lerroux, who then cooperated with the CEDA. In October 1934, Gil-Robles obtained two ministerial portfolios for CEDA; the following March, he acquired three more but at first stopped short of trying to obtain the office of Prime Minister. In the end, he decided to try for that post. Alcala-Zamora dissolved the Cortes on 7 January 1936, specifically to avoid that outcome. The dissolution triggered new elections to the Cortes. The left-wing Popular Front won a narrow majority. The Left majority in the new Cortes then applied a constitutional loophole to oust Alcala-Zamora. The Constitution allowed the Cortes to remove the president from office after two early dissolutions, and while the first (1933) dissolution had been partially justified because of the fulfillment of the constitutional mission of the first legislature, the second one had been a simple bid to trigger early elections. Deeming such action "unjustified", the newly elected Cortes dismissed the President on 7 April 1936 and elected Manuel Azaña to the position. Azaña was detested by the right, and Zamora's removal was a watershed moment since many Spaniards gave up on parliamentary politics. Final years and death The beginning of the Spanish Civil War surprised Alcalá-Zamora, who was then on a trip to Scandinavia. He decided to stay away from Spain when he found out that militiamen of the Popular Front government had illegally entered his home, stolen his belongings and plundered his safe-deposit box in the Madrid Crédit Lyonnais bank, taking the manuscript of his memoirs. When World War II began, Alcalá-Zamora was in France. The German occupation and the collaborationist attitude of the Vichy government made him leave France and go to Argentina in January 1942. There, he lived on money derived from his books,