Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

This private feeling among the UCD leaders soon finds public confirmation, and Suárez’s suspicion becomes a certainty. Knocked out by Felipe González’s devastating rhetorical skill during the debate triggered by the no-confidence motion tabled by the Socialists in May, Suárez embarrasses the deputies of his party by shying away from dialectical combat and allowing his ministers to be the ones to defend the government from the rostrum while the deputy leader of the Socialists, Alfonso Guerra, hurls an open secret at the Prime Minister. ‘Half the UCD deputies get excited when they hear Felipe González speak,’ Guerra proclaims in the Cortes. ‘And the other half get excited when they hear Manuel Fraga.’ Suárez survives the no-confidence vote by the skin of his teeth, but he does so knowing that Guerra’s sentence is not a mere rhetorical thrust of parliamentary squabble, that his political prestige borders on nil, that his party is threatening to disintegrate and that if he wants to avoid an end to his government and recover control of the UCD he must immediately take the initiative. So, as soon as he can, he summons all the Party chiefs together at a country estate belonging to the Ministry of Public Works, in Manzanares el Real, not far from Madrid. The conclave lasts three days and amounts to the worst humiliation he’s suffered so far in his political life; in fact, it’s easy to imagine that, barely has the debate begun, when his colleagues’ eyes reveal the truth to Suárez, and in them Suárez reads words like Falangist, nonentity, upstart, sycophant, ignoramus, card sharp, huckster, rogue, populist, inept. But he doesn’t have to imagine anything, because the reality is that during those three days the Party bosses of the UCD tell Suárez to his face what they’ve been saying behind his back for months, and if they don’t finish him off once and for all it’s because they have no viable replacement yet — none of them can count on the support of the others, and the rank and file of the Party is still with the Prime Minister — and because Suárez turns this to his advantage: after resisting as well as he can the criticisms they inflict on him from every angle, Suárez promises to mend his sorry prime ministerial ways and most of all makes a pledge to share power with them, to such an extent that from that moment on he is no longer in practice the head of the Party and government but has become a primus inter pares . Once the meeting ends, Suárez tries to fulfil the promise immediately; also the pledge, and at the end of August he designs with a few of his faithful a strategy that means reshuffling the Cabinet for the second time in a few months, giving important ministries to the UCD Party bosses. The arrangement is not short of counterweights damaging to his future — worst of all: it perhaps hastens the departure from the government of the Deputy Prime Minister Abril Martorell, a long-standing friend who in recent times has served as his shield as well as right-hand man — but convinces Suárez that he can smother the uprising with it and prolong his dying premiership and be compensated for the affronts received by proving to his critics that they’re mistaken. The one who’s mistaken, however, is him, because he doesn’t know or can’t understand that once respect for someone is lost it cannot be recovered, and inside his party the rebellion is unstoppable.

On 17 September, his new government recently constituted, Suárez, who appears at times to be waking from his lethargy, comfortably wins a confidence vote in the Cortes; since this should allow him to govern without problems in the upcoming months, it confirms for a few hours the optimism of his predictions. The next day, however, a riot breaks out. Miguel Herrero de Miñón — one of the leaders of the Christian Democrat sector of the Party — publishes an article in El País that pretends to be a reasoned clarification of the confidence motion but is in reality a frontal attack on his Prime Minister’s way of practising politics. A few days later the UCD deputies elect Herrero de Miñón to the post of Party spokesman in the Cortes; given that Herrero de Miñón had run on a platform of being an antidote to Suárez’s outrages and negligences, and given that he had sponsored a candidate who was defeated, this election represents a severe setback for the Prime Minister, who only then intuits that his summer promises and concessions have not dissolved the mounting rejection of him, but rather increased it. The intuition is now accurate, but belated: by this stage the powerful Christian Democrat sector of the UCD is publicly plotting to expel him from the premiership; the Liberals and Social Democrats and Blues have also begun to do so, and as autumn passes and winter begins even those most loyal to the Prime Minister secretly give up their loyalty and take positions in view of a future without him: pressured, wooed and backed up by journalists, businessmen, bankers, soldiers and clergymen, some aspire to form a new majority with Fraga; pressured, wooed and backed up by the Socialists’ youthful vigour, unbridled ambition and absolute faith in themselves, others aspire to form a new majority with González; all or almost all — Christian Democrats and Liberals and Social Democrats and Blues, long-standing anti-Suárists and bandwagon anti-Suárists — argue about how to replace Suárez without going to the polls and who to put in his place. In the early days of 1981, while the UCD prepares for its second conference, which will be held at the end of January in Palma de Mallorca, the Party’s confusion is total, and in these days a document demanding a greater degree of internal democracy, drawn up by the Prime Minister’s adversaries, has already been signed by more than five hundred centrist delegates, which amounts to a very serious threat to the control Suárez still has over the Party rank and file, his last stronghold. As in the Alianza Popular, as in the PSOE, as in the whole political village of Madrid, in the UCD there are also discussions of the idea that a military officer or a prestigious politician at the head of a coalition or interim or caretaker or unity government might be the best instrument to get Suárez out of government and overcome the crisis; certain heavyweight deputies indulge it — especially deputies from the Christian Democrat sector well connected to the military, and especially to Alfonso Armada, with whom some have personally discussed the idea — and in the middle of January the rumours that have been circulating with variable intensity since the summer proliferate, rumours of hard coups or soft and rumours of another motion of no confidence against the Prime Minister in the works, a motion probably presented by the PSOE but supported by a sector of the UCD if not organized from within it, which should guarantee its success and maybe the formation of the emergency government everyone’s talking about and for which everyone starting with Suárez himself knows that General Armada is putting himself forward. In reality the rumours about the no-confidence motion are much more than rumours — there is no doubt that the motion is seriously discussed within the Party — but in any case the UCD is, one month before 23 February, a seething mob of politicians tirelessly scheming against the Prime Minister of the government much more than the political party that sustains the government. The coup grows in the midst of this mob: this mob is not the whole placenta of the coup, but it is a substantial part of the placenta of the coup.

All these things happen in Spain, where everyone and everything seems to be plotting against Adolfo Suárez (or where Adolfo Suárez feels everyone and everything is plotting against him). Outside Spain the situation is no more favourable for the Prime Minister; it was, but it isn’t any more, among other reasons because since he came to power Suárez has done the opposite of what the world has done: while he was trying desperately to shift to the left, the world calmly shifted to the right.