Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

There might be still another reason why Suárez resigned, a reason perhaps more decisive than all the previous ones, because it constitutes their basis and gives them an additional and deeper meaning: Suárez resigned as Prime Minister of the government to give himself legitimacy as Prime Minister of the government. It’s a paradox, but Suárez is a paradoxical character, and the almost five years in which he remained in power were not for him in a certain sense anything but this: a permanent, agonizing and eventually futile fight to legitimize himself as Prime Minister. In July 1976, when the King put him in charge of the political reform, Suárez knew he was a legal prime minister, but he was not unaware — as he himself had said to a journalist who accosted him shortly after his appointment — that he was not a legitimate prime minister, because he wasn’t backed up by the votes of the citizens to carry out the reforms; in December 1976, when he won the referendum on the Law for Political Reform by a crushing majority — the legal instrument that allowed him to carry out the reforms — Suárez knew that victory legitimized him to effect the change from dictatorship to democracy or to some form of democracy, but he was not unaware that it did not give him legitimacy to act as Prime Minister, because he had been chosen by the King and a prime minister of the government was only legitimate after having been chosen by the citizens in free elections; in June 1977, when he won the first free elections, Suárez knew he was a democratic prime minister because he had the legitimacy of the citizens’ votes, but he was not unaware that he lacked the legitimacy of the law, because the laws of Francoism were still in force, and not those of democracy; in March 1979, when he won the first elections held after the passing of the Constitution, Suárez knew he had the full legitimacy of votes and laws, but that was when he realized he did not have moral legitimacy, because that was when the entire ruling class pounced to remind him — and perhaps he repeated it to himself, and against oneself there is no possible protection — that he’d never been anything but the King’s messenger boy, a mere little provincial Falangist, a Francoist upstart, a nonentity consumed by ambition and a rogue intellectually unfit to preside over the government who had never conceived of politics except as an instrument of personal prosperity, and whose foolish eagerness for power kept him tied to the premiership while the entire country fell to pieces around him. So, since the spring of 1979 Suárez knew he possessed all the political legitimacy he needed to govern, but only a year later discovered that he lacked the moral legitimacy (or he’d been divested of it): the only way he found to acquire it was to resign.

That in reality is the meaning of his resignation speech on television, a speech that contains an individual response to the King’s Christmas reproaches and a collective reproach to the ruling class that has denied him the longed-for legitimacy, but most of all contains a vindication of his political integrity, which, in a politician like Suárez, with no aptitude for distinguishing the personal from the political, also means a vindication of his personal integrity. Proudly, after all truthfully (although only after all), Suárez begins to explain to the country that he’s leaving of his own volition, ‘without anyone having asked me’, and that he’s doing so in order to demonstrate with his actions (‘because words seem not to be enough and we need to demonstrate with deeds what we are and what we want’) that the image of him that has been imposed as ‘a person clinging to his position’ is false. Suárez remembers his role in the change from dictatorship to democracy and states that he is not giving up the job of Prime Minister because his adversaries have defeated him or because he has been left without the strength to keep fighting them, which might not be true or not entirely true, but because he’s reached the conclusion that his giving up power might be more beneficial to the country than his remaining in it, which it indeed probably is: he wants his resignation to be ‘a moral salutary lesson’ able to banish ‘viscerality’, ‘the permanent discrediting of people’, ‘irrationally systematic attacks’ and ‘the useless wholesale discrediting’ for ever from the practice of democratic politics: all those aggressions of which he has been feeling victim for many months. ‘Something very important has to change in our attitudes and behaviour,’ he says. ‘And I want to contribute with my resignation so this change can be really immediate.’ Furthermore, Suárez does not say he’s retiring from politics — although he is giving up the leadership of his party; on the contrary: after declaring his optimism for the country’s future and for the UCD’s capacity to guide it, he maintains that politics ‘is going to carry on being my fundamental reason for living’. ‘I thank you all for your sacrifice, for your collaboration and for the repeated demonstrations of trust you’ve placed in me,’ he finishes. ‘I wanted to repay them with absolute devotion to my work and with dedication, self-denial and generosity. I promise that wherever I might be I shall remain identified with your aspirations. That I shall always be at your side and shall try, as long as I have the strength, to remain in the front line and with the same hard-working spirit. Thanks to every one of you and for everything.’

Let me repeat: the speech, including its good intentions and emotive rhetoric, means to be a moral as well as a political declaration. We have no reason to doubt his sincerity: by giving up the premiership Suárez intends to dignify democracy (and, in a certain sense, to protect it); but the ethical and political reasons are joined by reasons of personal strategy: for Suárez, resigning is also a way of protecting himself and dignifying himself to himself, recovering his self-esteem and his best self with the aim of preparing his return to power. That’s why I said before that resigning as Prime Minister was his final attempt to legitimize himself as Prime Minister. Let me correct myself now. It wasn’t his final attempt: it was the penultimate. The final one was on the evening of 23 February, when, sitting on his bench while the bullets whizzed around him in the Cortes chamber and words were no longer enough and he had to demonstrate with actions what he was and what he wanted, he told the political class and the whole country that, though he might have the dirtiest democratic pedigree in the great sewer of Madrid and had been a little provincial Falangist and Francoist upstart and an uneducated nonentity, he was indeed ready to risk his neck for democracy.

* Suárez contributed in his way to the success of González’s bluff, and his contribution demonstrates that at that moment as well democracy mattered more to him than power: once González had resigned, the Prime Minister had the opportunity to facilitate a leadership takeover of the PSOE by a group of Marxists — Enrique Tierno Galván, Luis Gómez Llorente, Francisco Bustelo — whom he probably would have easily defeated in elections; he didn’t do it: he facilitated González’s return because, although he knew he was a much more considerable electoral adversary, he thought a young social democrat like him was much more useful for the stability of democracy than his adversaries. This is another proof that above all Suárez wanted the game he’d invented to work.

I have left one question pending, and now return to it: were the intelligence services plotting against the democratic system in the autumn and winter of 1980? Did the Higher Defence Intelligence Centre, CESID, participate in the coup d’état? The hypothesis is not only literarily irresistible, but historically plausible, and this is in part why it continues to be one of the most controversial points of 23 February. The hypothesis is plausible because it is not infrequent that in periods of political regime change the intelligence services — liberated from their old bosses and not yet entirely under the control of the new ones, or discontented with their old bosses for provoking the disappearance of the old regime — tend to operate autonomously and form focal points of resistance to change, organizing or participating in manoeuvres designed to make it fail. That’s what happened in 1991 for example in the Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev. Did it also happen ten years earlier in the Spain of Adolfo Suárez? In 1981 was CESID a focal point of resistance to change? Did CESID organize the 23 February coup? Did they participate in it?