Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

Politically alone and exhausted, personally lost in a labyrinth of self-pity, exasperation and disillusion, towards November 1980 Suárez began to think of resigning. If he didn’t do so it was because he was held back by inertia or the instinct for power and because he was a pure politician and a pure politician never gives up power: he gets thrown out; also, maybe, because in the moments of euphoria interspersed in his dejection a scrap of courage and pride persuaded him that, although nothing that he might do from then on could outdo what he’d already done, only he could fix what he himself had done wrong. In those days he sought relief and stimulation in trips abroad, where his standing as the maker of Spanish democracy still remained intact; in the course of one of them, after attending the inauguration of the Peruvian Prime Minister Belaúnde Terry in Lima, Suárez gave one of his last interviews as Prime Minister to the journalist Josefina Martínez, and the result of that interview was a text so dark, so bitter and so sincere — so full of laments about ingratitude, incomprehension and the personal offences and insults of which he felt himself the object — that his advisers prevented its publication. ‘I tend to say that I’m engaged in a boxing match in which I’m not willing to throw a single punch,’ Suárez said to the journalist that day. ‘I want to win the fight in the fifteenth round by exhausting the opponent. . So I must have great stamina!’ It’s false that he didn’t throw a single punch (he threw some, but he no longer had the strength to keep at it), but it’s true that he had great stamina, and it’s especially true that he saw himself like that many times in the autumn and winter of 1980: in the centre of the ring, staggering and blinded by blood, sweat and black eyes, with his arms hanging dead at his sides, breathing heavily under the shouts of the spectators and the heat of the lights, secretly longing for the final blow.

The final blow was landed by the King. Maybe he was the only one who could have delivered it: the King had given power to Suárez so maybe only the King could take it away from him; he did: he took his power, or at least spared no effort in getting Suárez to hand it back. This means that, like the majority of the Spanish political class, in the autumn and winter of 1980 the King was also in his way plotting against the Prime Minister of his government; this means that Gutiérrez Mellado was mistaken: the King wasn’t on their side either.

The King had met Suárez in January 1969, during a vacation trip to Segovia in the company of a cortege that included his personal secretary and future leader of 23 February: General Armada. At the time Suárez was the civilian governor of the province and the King a precarious prince still a few months away from being sworn in by the Francoist Cortes as Franco’s successor, but whose future as King was not entirely clear even to Franco himself, because it hung from a delicately balanced web that might break after his death. The two men got along well from the start; from the start they sensed that each needed the other: Suárez was not a monarchist, but he immediately became a monarchist, undoubtedly because he knew that, in spite of the balancing acts and uncertainties, Spain’s most credible future was the monarchy and he didn’t want to miss the future for anything in the world; as for the King, harassed and ignored by very influential sectors of Francoism — starting with Franco’s own family — he urgently needed allies, and that young man only six years older than him, discreet, promising, diligent, obliging and talkative, must have seemed like a good ally at first sight. The first day Suárez just had lunch with the Royal Family in a restaurant in Segovia, but during the following months the King returned several times to an estate in the province, in the Guadarrama sierra, and there a weekend complicity was forged between the two men that possibly ended up convincing the future monarch that, if he knew how to use his eagerness to please, his ambition and his quick and practical intelligence, Suárez could come to be much more than amusing company for him. It’s unlikely they talked much about politics at the beginning, although it’s almost certain that the King understood very soon that Suárez’s brain was not fossilized by Francoism, that he knew how to lead and lacked elaborate political ideas; it’s also unlikely that he didn’t suspect that his main political idea consisted in prospering politically, and that his monarchism therefore depended exclusively on the Crown’s ability to satisfy his aspirations.

From that moment on the King did as much as he could to promote Suárez’s political career. In November of the same year he interceded to persuade Admiral Carrero Blanco to appoint him director general of Radiotelevisión Española, and Suárez didn’t waste any time at all in proving to the monarch he hadn’t been mistaken in betting on him. During the four years he ran the country’s only television station he orchestrated an image campaign that introduced the until then fleeting and vague figure of the Prince into every home: he did not fail to record a single one of his trips, or a single one of his official acts, or a single one of his public appearances; his recently acquired monarchist vocation (or his convert’s zeal) led him into confrontation on several occasions with his boss the Cabinet minister, especially when he refused to broadcast live and on the main channel the wedding of Franco’s granddaughter to Alfonso de Borbón, the Prince’s cousin, who also aspired to the throne, and whose matrimony raised hopes in the general’s innermost circle of seeing power perpetuated in Franco’s family. By that time, in the early 1970s, Suárez had already begun to put himself forward for a ministry, but he did not receive one until the death of Franco when the first government of the monarchy was formed and the King, who lacked sufficient strength to impose a prime minister to his taste and was obliged to inherit Arias Navarro — a hesitant mummy unable to settle up his Francoist debts — had enough to impose Suárez, to whom Arias Navarro assigned the key post of Minister Secretary General of the Movimiento after being convinced by Torcuato Fernández Miranda, then the King’s main political adviser and President of the Cortes and of the Council of the Kingdom, two of the dictatorship’s prime bastions of power. Only six months later the King managed to get rid of Arias Navarro and, after a series of intrigues by Fernández Miranda in the Council of the Kingdom — the body in charge of presenting the monarch with a trio of candidates for Prime Minister — chose Adolfo Suárez to head the government.

He wasn’t the only possible choice. There were much more obvious candidates, with better monarchist credentials, better intellectual training and more political experience; but the King (or the King advised by Fernández Miranda) calculated that at that time such virtues were actually defects: a government under, let’s say, José María de Areilza — a cultured, cosmopolitan man, eternally devoted to the Crown, well connected to the clandestine opposition and a favourite of many of the regime’s reformers — or Manuel Fraga — former minister under Franco and later leader of the right — would have been an Areilza government or a Fraga government, because Fraga and Areilza both had very strong personalities and their own political projects; a Suárez government, on the other hand, wouldn’t be a Suárez government, but the King’s government, because Suárez (or this at least was the King’s and Fernández Miranda’s belief) lacked any political project and was ready to carry out the one the King entrusted to him and in the way in which it was entrusted. The King’s project was democracy; more precisely: the King’s project was some form of democracy that would allow the monarchy to take root; still more precisely: the King’s project was some form of democracy not because he found Francoism repugnant or because he was impatient to give up the powers he’d inherited from Franco or because he believed in democracy as a universal panacea, but because he believed in the monarchy and because he thought that at that moment a democracy was the only way to root the monarchy in Spain. However, changing a dictatorship into a democracy without breaking the law was a very complex, perhaps unheard-of operation, and the King needed to monitor it closely, so he needed someone to manage it whose passion for power made him absolutely faithful and absolutely docile, a man of his age who wouldn’t feel the temptation to guide him or impose on him and with whom he could maintain a fluid relation. Suárez fulfilled these conditions from the outset; others as well. He knew the Francoist political class and the corridors of power off by heart, every last nook and cranny of the system that had to be demolished, he was young, clever, quick, fresh, realistic, flexible, efficient, charming and smooth enough to persuade the opposition that everything was going to change while persuading the Francoists that nothing was going to change although everything was changing. Finally, as well as the daring of ignorance and the fearlessness of those who have nothing to lose, he possessed an exorbitant self-confidence and an unshakeable desire to win that should enable him to carry out the job they were going to give him, withstanding the furious attacks from all sides without wavering and without getting completely burnt before his time was up.