Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

Since before the summer those recent arrivals in the salons, tertulias and restaurants of the political village of Madrid have talked and heard talk of golpes de estado , coups d’état, of governments of national unity, caretaker governments, governments of salvation, of de Gaulle-style operations; their attitude to this is ambiguous: on the one hand the rumours worry them; on the other hand they don’t want to be left to one side when it comes to replacing Suárez, because they are impatient to prove that, as well as knowing how to operate in opposition, they know how to operate in government, and they also begin to consider the idea of forming a coalition or caretaker or unity government chaired by a military officer, a proposal for which in the last week of August they seek support in discussions with Jordi Pujol, premier of the Catalan autonomous government. Undoubtedly with this idea in mind, in the autumn the Socialists make enquiries into the Army’s mood and about the murmurs of a military coup, and in mid-October, after an internal meeting during which Felipe González wonders whether all the warning lights of the democracy were not already flashing and in which they discuss the eventuality of the Party entering a coalition government, several PSOE leaders meet with General Sabino Fernández Campo, secretary to the King, and with General Alfonso Armada, his predecessor in the post, whose name had been on everyone’s lips for months as a possible leader of a government of unity. Felipe González is involved in the interview with Fernández Campo; not in the interview with Alfonso Armada: it is conducted by Enrique Múgica, the Party’s number three and until recently leader of the Congressional Defence Committee. In light of 23 February the conversation between Múgica and Armada takes on important significance, and its protagonists have told of it in public more than once. The interview, which lasts for almost four hours, is held on 22 October during a lunch given at the home of the Mayor of Lérida, in the province of which the general has been military governor since the beginning of the year, and is attended, as well as by the host, by Joan Raventós, leader of the Catalan Socialists. Múgica and Armada seem to get along personally; politically as well, at least on the crucial point: both agree that the situation of the country is catastrophic, which according to Armada is of great worry to the King and is putting the Crown in danger; both agree that the only one responsible for the catastrophe is Suárez and that Suárez leaving power is the only possible solution to the mess, although according to Armada the solution would not be complete unless an interim or unity government was immediately formed with the participation of the principal political parties and led by an independent, if possible from the military. Múgica does not say no to this last suggestion; then Raventós interjects and asks Armada if he would be willing to be the military officer who heads the government; Armada does not say no to this suggestion either. The lunch ends without promises or commitments, but Múgica writes up a report on the interview for the Party’s executive committee, in the weeks that follow various members of that organization sound out leaders of minority parties about the possibility of forming a coalition government led by a soldier and over the course of the autumn and winter several different rumours spread around Madrid — the PSOE plans a new no-confidence motion supported by a sector of Suárez’s party, the PSOE plans to enter a caretaker or interim government with Fraga’s party and a sector of Suárez’s party — united by the common denominator of a general with whom the Socialists intend to remove Suárez from Moncloa.

That was all. Or that’s all we know, because at that time the leaders of the PSOE often discussed the role the Army could play in situations of emergency such as the one they believed the country was going through, which was a way of signalling the landing strip for military intervention. In any case, the long lunchtime chat between Enrique Múgica and General Armada in Lérida and the movements and rumours to which it gave rise constituted backing for Armada’s golpista inclinations and a good alibi enabling the King’s former secretary to insinuate or declare here and there in the months before the coup that the Socialists would readily participate in a unitarian government led by him or were even encouraging him to form one, and on the night of 23 February, again waving the banner of the PSOE’s acquiescence, to try to impose that government by force. All this does not of course mean that during the autumn and winter of 1980 the Socialists were plotting in favour of a military coup against democracy; it only means that a strong dose of irresponsible bewilderment induced by an itching for power led them to press to a frightening degree the siege of the legitimate Prime Minister of the country and that, believing they were manoeuvring against Adolfo Suárez, they ended up manoeuvring unknowingly in favour of the enemies of democracy.

But more than anyone else it is his own party that is plotting against Suárez (that Suárez feels is especially plotting against him): the Unión de Centro Democrático. The word party is imprecise; in reality, the Union of the Democratic Centre is not a party but a painstaking cocktail of groups with disparate ideologies — from Liberals and Christian Democrats to Social Democrats, by way of the so-called Blues, who like Suárez came from the very belly of the Francoist machine — an electoral brand improvised in the spring of 1977 to stand in the first free elections for forty years at the inducement of Adolfo Suárez, who according to all prognostications would win thanks to the success of his trajectory as Prime Minister, during which he’s managed to dismantle in less than a year the institutional framework of Francoism and call the first democratic elections. Finally the predictions are fulfilled: Suárez achieves the victory and over the two years that follow the UCD remains united by the glue of power, by Suárez’s undisputed leadership and by the historical urgency of constructing a system of liberties. The spring of 1979 sees Suárez’s stellar moment, the peak of his command and also that of his party: in December the Constitution had been passed, in March he won his second general election, in April his first municipal ones, the edifice of the new state seems on the point of being completed with the processing of the statutes of autonomy of Catalonia and the Basque Country; just at this moment of fulfilment, however, Suárez begins to sink into a sort of lethargy from which he will not emerge until he leaves the premiership, and his party begins to splinter irremediably. The phenomenon is strange, but not inexplicable, it’s just that it doesn’t have one single explanation, but several. I’ll suggest two: one is political and it is that Suárez, who had been able to do the most difficult things, is unable to do the easiest; the other is personal and is that Suárez, who until then has appeared to be a politician of steel, collapses psychologically. I’ll add a third explanation, at once political and personal: the jealousies, rivalries and discrepancies that germinate at the heart of his party.

In effect: at the end of March 1980, when the inefficient running of the country can no longer be hidden and pessimism is overwhelming in the opinion polls the government commissions, three bitter defeats at the ballot box (in the Basque Country, in Catalonia and in Andalusia) reveal unsatisfied ambitions in the UCD and ideological disagreements until then covered by the glitter of victory, so that any relevant matter (economic policy, autonomy policy, education policy, the divorce law, whether to join NATO) and more than one irrelevant matter provoke controversies that are postponed to avoid an internal explosion and that time does nothing but exacerbate; for his part, Suárez is increasingly absent, perplexed and locked away in the domestic labyrinth of Moncloa, and has lost the energy of his early years in government and seems unable to restore order to the rebellious ruckus his party has become, perhaps because he suspects that for quite a while, encouraged by his own weakness, like animals who’ve got the scent of fear in their prey the leaders of the theoretically fused groups of the UCD again consider him what maybe deep down they have never stopped considering him: a little provincial Falangist consumed by ambition, an ignorant nonentity, a textbook arriviste who had thrived in the corrupt environment of Francoism thanks to flattery and fiddling and who continued to thrive afterwards thanks to the King putting him in charge of dismantling with a card sharp’s tricks and huckster’s verbosity the whole Movimiento set-up, a rogue who years earlier was perhaps a necessary evil, because he knew the cesspits of Francoism better than anybody, but who is now driving the country to the brink with his risible statesman pretensions. This is how Suárez begins to suspect the leaders of his party see him; his suspicions are not groundless: arrogant lawyers, prestigious professionals from good families, high-ranking career civil servants, cultured, cosmopolitan men or men who think themselves cultured and cosmopolitan, the UCD leaders have gone in a few years from crawling to Suárez, investing him with the supremacy of a charismatic leader, to denouncing ever more openly his personal and intellectual limitations, his incompetence at governing, his abysmal qualities as a parliamentarian, his ignorance of democratic customs — which authorizes him to believe that he can keep governing as he did in his time as appointed Prime Minister, when he answered only to the King — his snubbing of the Cortes and the deputies of his party in the Cortes, his chaotic way of working, his pseudo-leftist populism and his fugitive’s isolation in Moncloa, where he lives sequestered by a drove of incompetent and disorganized acolytes. In April 1980 that is the reality which for Suárez then is only a suspicion: that all the leaders of all the ranks of his party despise him, as do many of his seconds, and all of them feel they could replace him and do a better job.