Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

I do not know what Suárez’s immediate reaction to the King’s speech was. But I know that Suárez knew two things: one is that although the King had no legal right to ask for his resignation he did retain a moral right over him for having made him Prime Minister four years earlier; the other is that — having lost the support of the man on the street, of Parliament, of his party, of Rome and Washington, blind and staggering and sobbing in the centre of the ring amid the howling of the spectators and the heat of the lights — losing the King’s support entirely meant losing his last support and receiving the final blow. That same day Suárez must have understood that his only choice was to resign. This does not contradict the fact that, according to some sources, in a meeting held on 4 January in La Pleta, the royal residence in the mountains, in Lérida, the King hinted that he should resign, and Suárez refused to do so. It could well be: death throes are death throes, and some resist dying, although they know they’re already dead. The fact is that only three weeks after the high-noon Christmas warning from the monarch, Suárez told his closest allies that he was giving up the leadership of the government. On the 27th he told the King in his office in the Zarzuela. The King did not put on an act: he didn’t ask him to explain the reasons for his resignation, he didn’t make the slightest ceremonial pretence of refusing it or ceremonially ask if he’d considered his decision carefully, he didn’t have a word of thanks for the Prime Minister who had helped him preserve the Crown either; he just summoned his secretary, General Sabino Fernández Campo, and told him as soon as he entered the office, looking at him but pointing a pitiless finger at Suárez: He’s going.

On 29 January 1981, twenty-five days before the coup, Adolfo Suárez announced his resignation as Prime Minister in a televised speech. The question is inevitable: how is it possible that the man who claimed the only way he’d leave Moncloa was if he lost an election or feet first was leaving Moncloa voluntarily? Was Suárez not a pure politician and is a pure politician not a politician who never gives up power unless thrown out? The answer is that Suárez did not give up power voluntarily, but was thrown out: the man on the street threw him out, Parliament threw him out, Rome and Washington threw him out, his own party threw him out, his own personal collapse threw him out and in the end the King threw him out. There is another answer, which is the same: since he was an absolutely pure politician, Suárez left before the sum of those adversaries threw him out and with the aim of justifying himself before the country, thus thwarting the alliance that had formed against him and preparing his return to power.

With the exception of the 23 February coup — of which it was actually a basic ingredient — no event in recent Spanish history had unleashed as much speculation as Adolfo Suárez’s resignation; however, of all the enigmas of 23 February maybe the least enigmatic might be Adolfo Suárez’s resignation. Although it’s impossible to exhaust the reasons that triggered it, it’s possible to rule out the most truculent and publicized of them. Suárez did not resign because the military forced him to and he did not resign to prevent a military coup: as Prime Minister he was prone to many faults, but cowardice was not one of them, and there is no doubt that, no matter how crushed he might have been, if the military had pointed a pistol at his chest Suárez would have immediately ordered them to stand to attention; there is no doubt either that had he known a coup was in the works he would have got ready to stop it. The most remembered phrase from his resignation speech seems to belie this last assertion: ‘As often happens in history,’ said Suárez, ‘the continuity of a project demands a change of personnel, and I don’t want the democratic system of coexistence to be, once again, a parenthesis in the history of Spain.’ This sacrificial declaration, suggesting that its author was sacrificing himself to save democracy that retrospectively seemed to become saturated with significance on 23 February, did not figure in the draft of the speech that Suárez sent to the Royal Household on the eve of his television appearance, but was added at the last minute and, in spite of at least one of the people who normally wrote and corrected his texts crossing it out of the speech, Suárez put it back in. It was perhaps a characteristic dramatic emphasis and of a piece with his particular resignation strategy, but not pretence. Although he didn’t know that the placenta of a coup against democracy was growing in the country, Suárez was not unaware that the intrigues against him were also dangerous to democracy, because they aimed to get him out of power without elections and straining to the maximum the mechanisms of a recently introduced game; he was not unaware (or at least he suspected) that a no-confidence motion was being prepared in order to unseat him; he was not unaware (or at least he suspected) that this motion might have the backing of a portion of his own party, and might therefore triumph; he was not unaware that many felt the motion should bring a general in to lead a coalition or caretaker or unity government; he was not unaware that the King approved or was seriously considering the manoeuvre, or at least was allowing some to believe he approved or was seriously considering it; he was not unaware that the most likely military man to carry it out was Alfonso Armada, and that in spite of his objections the King was doing everything possible to bring his former secretary to Madrid as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff. All this undoubtedly struck him as dangerous to his future, but — because it meant putting the brand-new mechanisms of the democratic game to the test by involving the Army in an operation that opened the doors of politics to a military reluctant to accept the system of liberties, if not impatient to destroy it — it also struck him as dangerous to the future of democracy: Suárez knew its rules and, although he didn’t work well within them, he’d invented the game or thought he’d invented the game and was not ready to allow it to fail, for the simple reason that he was its inventor. To avoid the risk of the game failing he resigned.

But, although he was politically finished and personally broken, he also resigned for the same reason any pure politician would have done: in order to be able to keep playing; that is: so as not to be expelled by force from the table and the game and find himself shown out of the casino through the false door and with no possibility of returning. In fact, it’s possible that Suárez, by announcing his resignation, intended to imitate a triumphant bluff by Felipe González, who in May of 1979 had quit the leadership of the PSOE, in dispute with the Party still defining itself as Marxist, and just four months later, when the PSOE hadn’t managed to replace him and had expunged the word Marxist from its statutes, returned to his post welcomed by a huge crowd.* It’s possible that Suárez was trying to provoke a similar reaction in his party; if he was, he was on the verge of achieving it. On 29 January, the very day Suárez announced his resignation from the premiership on television, the second UCD Party conference was due to begin in Palma de Mallorca; Suárez’s strategy perhaps consisted of a surprise announcement of his resignation during the first day and then waiting for the commotion this provoked to ignite a revolt among the rank and file of the organization against the leaders who would put him straight back into the leadership of the Party and the government or would do so within a few short months. Bad luck (perhaps combined with the cunning of some of his adversaries in the government) thwarted his plans: a strike of air traffic controllers forced the conference to be postponed for a few days right at the moment when Suárez had already communicated his intention to resign to several ministers and some of the rank and file leaders of his party, and the result of this setback was that, convinced that the scoop couldn’t be kept secret for so long, he had to make his resignation known before he’d planned, so when the conference was finally held in the first week of February the time gone by since the announcement of his withdrawal had dampened the impact of the news, which was not enough to recover his lost power but was enough to allow him to take control of the leadership of the UCD, to be the member with the most votes from his fellow Party members and for the conference to give him a long and warm standing ovation.