Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

All this would become clear to the King at the beginning of April when Suárez pulled the most audacious move of his career, another death-defying political leap, but this time with no net: the legalization of the Communist Party. That measure was the limit the military had placed on the reform and which Suárez had seemed to accept or had made them believe he accepted; perhaps at first he really did accept it, but, as he became steeped in his character of democratic Prime Minister without democracy and he absorbed the reasons of an opposition pushing him from the street with popular demonstrations and forcing him to go much further than he had planned on the path of reform, Suárez understood he needed the Communist Party as much as the Communist Party needed him. Towards the end of February he’d already made one decision and had come up with an idea for a high-wire juggling act like the one that let Franco’s Cortes sacrifice themselves, except this time he chose to carry it out practically alone and practically in secret: first, with the disagreement of Fernández Miranda and Osorio but the agreement of the King, he held a secret meeting with Santiago Carrillo and sealed with him a pact of steel; then he sought to cover his back with a legal opinion from the Supreme Court favourable to the legalization and, when they refused him, he manoeuvred to get it out of the Attorney General’s Office; then he sounded out the military ministers and sowed confusion among them, ordering General Gutiérrez Mellado to warn them that the PCE could be legalized (they were waiting for a judicial proceeding, Gutiérrez Mellado told them, and also if they wanted some clarification the Prime Minister was prepared to provide it), although he didn’t tell them when or how or even if it was effectively going to be legalized, a juggling act within the juggling act with which he intended to avoid the charge from the military ministers that he hadn’t informed them and at the same time to prevent them from reacting against his decision before it was announced; then he waited for the Easter holidays, sent the King and Queen on a trip to France, Carrillo to Cannes, his ministers on vacation and, with the streets of the big cities deserted and the barracks deserted and the editorial offices of the newspapers and radio and television stations deserted, he stayed alone in Madrid, playing cards with General Gutiérrez Mellado. Finally, again with the King’s support and Osorio’s opposition and without even consulting Fernández Miranda, on Easter Saturday — the most deserted day of those deserted days — he legalized the PCE. It was a bombshell, and it very nearly blew up in his hands: he’d made that wild decision because triumphs had given him an absolute confidence in himself and, although he expected the shock to the Army would be brutal and that there would be protests and threats and perhaps outbreaks of rebellion, reality outdid his worst predictions, and at some moments during the four insane days that followed Easter Saturday, maybe Suárez thought more than once that he’d overestimated his strengths and that a coup d’état was inevitable, until on the fifth day he once again translated the imminent catastrophe into his own gain: he kept the utmost pressure on Carrillo until he managed to persuade the Party publicly to renounce some of its symbols and accept all those the Army considered threatened by their legalization: the monarchy, the unity of the nation and the red-and-yellow flag. At this point it all stopped. The soldiers stayed in their barracks, the whole country must have held its breath and Suárez scored a double victory: on the one hand he managed to tame the military — or at least tame them for the moment — forcing them to swallow what was for them an indigestible decision and for him (and for democracy) an indispensable one; on the other hand he managed to tame the Communist Party — and with the Communist Party, not much later, the whole democratic opposition — forcing them to join the project of the parliamentary monarchy unreservedly, turning the eternal adversary into the principal support of the system. To finish off the fluke, Suárez had converted Fernández Miranda and Osorio into two suddenly antiquated politicians, ready for retirement, and everything was ready to call the first democratic elections in forty years and win them by capitalizing on the success of his reforms.

He called them and won them, and along the way also eliminated Fraga and Areilza, his last two rivals. The first he shelved away in an antediluvian party where they flailed at the fugitive glories of the Francoist exodus; on the second he took no pity. Suárez had no party of his own with which to stand for election, so for months, crouched down, plotting from a distance and playing along with the bluff that he wasn’t even going to stand as a candidate, he waited while a huge coalition of centrist parties formed around a party led by Areilza; once the coalition was formed, he pounced on it and, strengthened by the generalized certainty that the electoral list headed by his prestige as midwife of the reform would be the winner of the elections, he placed before the leaders of the new formation a clear dilemma: either Areilza or him. There was no need to answer: Areilza had to withdraw, Suárez remodelled the coalition to suit himself and on 3 May 1977, the same day the UCD was founded, announced his candidacy in the elections. Less than a month and a half later he won. Perhaps Suárez rightly thought that he, not the UCD, had won, that without him the UCD was nothing; but, rightly or wrongly, perhaps he also began to think other things. Perhaps he thought that without him not only would the UCD not exist: the rest of the parties wouldn’t exist either. Perhaps he thought that without him not only would the rest of the parties not exist: democracy wouldn’t exist either. Perhaps he thought that he was his party, that he was the government, that he was democracy, because he was the charismatic leader who had brought forty years of dictatorship to an end in eleven months, peacefully with an unprecedented operation. Perhaps he thought he was going to govern for decades. Perhaps he thought, therefore, that he wasn’t going to govern just with a view to the right and to the centre — where his voters were, the ones who had put him in power — but also with a view to the left: after all, he would think, a true leader does not govern for the few, but for all; after all, he would think, he also needed the left to be able to govern; after all, he would think, deep down he was a Social Democrat, almost a Socialist; after all, he would think, he was no longer a Falangist but he had been one and Falangism and the left shared the same anti-capitalist rhetoric, the same social concern, the same contempt for the tycoons; after all, he would think, he was anything but a tycoon, he’d risen from the ranks in politics and in life, he knew the forsakenness of the street and miserable boarding houses and starvation wages and there was no way he was going to accept being described as a right-wing politician, he belonged to the centre left, increasingly more to the left and less to the centre although the centre and the right voted for him, he was light years away from Fraga and his Francoist pachyderms, to be on the right was to be old in body and spirit, to be against history and against the oppressed, carrying the guilt and the shame of forty years of Francoism, while to be progressive was the fairest, most modern and most audacious thing to be and he always — always: since he ruled his adolescent crew in Ávila and embodied to perfection the ideal youth of the dictatorship — had been the fairest, most modern and most audacious, his Francoist past was at once very far away and too close and humiliated him with its proximity, he was not who he had once been, he was now not only the maker of democracy but also its champion, the main bastion of its defence, he had constructed it with his own hands and he was going to defend it from the military and from the terrorists, from the far right and from the far left, the bankers and the businessmen, politicians and journalists and adventurers, Rome and Washington.