Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

Is the Church also plotting against Suárez? Does Suárez feel the Church is also plotting against him? Just as in recent times he has made enemies of the journalists and bankers and businessmen and of almost the entire political class of the country, shortly before the coup Suárez makes an enemy of the Catholic Church; the Church, for its part, abandons him to his fate, if not actually doing everything in its power to bring him down. For Suárez, a religious man, a weekly Mass Christian, educated in seminaries and Acción Católica associations, very aware of the enormous power the Church still possesses in Spain and that its support is one of the few he has left in the disordered scattering of these final months, the setback is a terrible blow. The Church — or at least the upper echelons of the Church or an important part of the upper echelons of the Church — had favoured the change from dictatorship to democracy on the eve of Franco’s death and, since Suárez had come to power, Cardinal Tarancón, president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference from 1971, established a complicity with him over the years that managed to weather the Church’s determination to maintain its eternal privileged status in spite of political transformations. In the autumn of 1980, however, Suárez and Tarancón’s relationship snaps; the provocation for the rupture is the divorce law, an unacceptable revolution for a large part of the Church and the Spanish right. By that time the law has been in the works for almost two years, always under the control of Christian Democrat ministers and always guarded by a personal pact between Suárez and Tarancón severely restricting its reach; but in September of that year, as a consequence of one of the cyclical crises that rock the government, the law passes into the hands of the leader of the Social Democrat sector of the Prime Minister’s party, who accelerates proceedings and manages to get the Congressional Justice Committee to approve in mid-December a much more permissive projected divorce law than the one agreed between Suárez and Tarancón. His response is immediate: furious, feeling betrayed, he breaks all links with Suárez, and from that moment on, wrong-footed by the Prime Minister’s feint — or by his weakness, which prevents him from keeping his promises — Tarancón is left at the mercy of the conservative bishops, partisans of Manuel Fraga, who also see their positions reinforced by the arrival in Madrid of an extraordinarily conservative papal nuncio representing the extraordinarily conservative Pope John Paul II: Monsignor Innocenti. So Suárez is also left undefended on the religious flank; more than undefended: it is a fact that the nunciature as well as members of the Episcopal Conference encouraged operations against Suárez organized by the Christian Democrats of his party, and it’s very likely that the nuncio and some bishops were informed in the days before the coup that a trimming or rectification of democracy with the backing of the King was imminent. It’s hard to believe all this had nothing to do with the Church’s behaviour on 23 February. That afternoon the plenary assembly of the Episcopal Conference was meeting at the Pinar de Chamartín Retreat, in Madrid, with the aim of electing Cardinal Tarancón’s replacement; on learning the news of the assault on the Cortes the assembly broke up without pronouncing a single word in favour of democracy or making a single gesture of condemnation or protest at that outrage against liberty. Not a single word. Not a single gesture. Nothing. It’s true: like almost everyone else.

Of course the main opposition, the PSOE, the Spanish Socialist Party, is plotting against Suárez (or Suárez feels they’re plotting against him). But, unlike Fraga and his party, the businessmen and bankers and even the journalists, the leaders of the PSOE have absolutely no experience of power and are barely beginning to penetrate the corridors of the great sewer of Madrid, so they operate with a naive rookie clumsiness that makes them easy to manipulate by those planning the coup.

The Socialists have been the surprise of the new democracy: run since 1974 by an impetuous group of young men with a clean democratic pedigree (albeit little or no relevance in the struggle against Franco), the PSOE is from then on a party clustered around the leadership of Felipe González, and in 1977, after the first democratic elections, becomes the second largest party in the country and the largest on the left, displacing Santiago Carrillo’s Communist Party, which throughout the Franco period has been in practice the only party of clandestine opposition. The electoral triumph plunges the Socialists into a perplexed euphoria, and for the next two years they develop, as do Fraga’s right and Carrillo’s Communists, a politics of accords with Suárez that culminates in the passing of the Constitution, but at the beginning of 1979, when the first constitutional elections are about to be held, they understand their time has come: like so many people on the right and the left, they think that, once the edifice of Francoism has been demolished and the edifice of democracy erected with the Constitution, Suárez has finished the task the King assigned him; they don’t despise Suárez (or not yet, or not in public, or not entirely) for being an upstart errand boy designated in haste as foreman and eventually self-styled architect, although they are absolutely sure that only they can successfully administer democracy, establish it in the country and integrate the country into Europe; they think the country thinks like them and they also think, as jittery as hungry children in front of a cake-shop window, that if they don’t win these elections they’ll never win; they think they’re going to win. But they don’t win, and that disappointment is mainly responsible for four decisions they make in the following months: the first consists of attributing their unexpected defeat to Suárez’s final television appearance of the campaign, in which the Prime Minister managed to frighten an electorate wary of the Marxist radicalism of a PSOE that according to its statutes was still a Marxist party but according to its deeds and words was already a social democratic party; the second is to interpret Suárez’s televised intervention as a dirty trick, and to assume that you can’t play fair with someone who plays dirty; the third consists of accepting that they would only get into government if they managed to destroy Suárez politically and personally, demolishing the reputation of the leader who had beaten them in two consecutive elections; the fourth is the corollary of the previous three: it consists of going all out for Suárez’s head.

From the autumn of 1979 — once the term Marxism was eliminated from the PSOE statutes and Felipe González’s power in the leadership of the Party reinforced — the offensive, increasingly endorsed by Suárez’s inability to curb the country’s deterioration, is merciless: the Socialists paint a daily apocalyptic picture of the Prime Minister’s administration, they dig up and throw in his face his past as a Falangist errand boy and Movimiento social climber, accuse him of ruining the democratic project, of being ready to sell Spain in order to remain in Moncloa, call him illiterate, a card sharp, a potential golpista . Meanwhile, they opt for dramatic effect, and in the middle of May 1980 propose a vote of no confidence against Suárez in the Cortes. The manoeuvre, destined in theory to make Felipe González Prime Minister, is a mathematical failure because the Socialist leader does not obtain enough votes to remove Suárez from his post, but most of all it is a propagandistic success: during the debate the television cameras show a young, persuasive and prime ministerial González facing an aged and defeated Suárez unable even to defend himself from his adversary’s attacks. This triumph, however, marks a limit: with the no-confidence motion the Socialists have used up the parliamentary mechanisms for taking the premiership; and this is when, goaded by desperation and fear and immaturity and greed for power, they begin to explore the limits of the recently debuted democracy, forcing its rules to the utmost without yet having mastered them; and this is when they turn into useful tools for the golpistas .