Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

Are a politician’s private vices public virtues? Is it possible to arrive at good by way of evil? Is it insufficient or ungenerous to judge a politician ethically and should he only be judged politically? Are ethics and politics incompatible and is the expression political ethics an oxymoron? At least since Plato philosophy has discussed the problem of the tension between means and ends, and there is no such thing as a serious code of ethics that has not wondered whether or not it is permissible to use dubious, or dangerous, or simply evil means to achieve good ends. Machiavelli had no doubt that it was possible to arrive at good by way of evil, but a near contemporary of his, Michel de Montaigne, was even more explicit: ‘The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre’; that’s why both thought politics should be left in the hands of ‘the strongest and boldest citizens, who sacrifice their honour and conscience for the good of their country’. Max Weber put the question in similar terms. Weber doesn’t think that ethics and politics are exactly incompatible, but he does think that political ethics are a specific type of ethics, with lethal secondary effects: against absolute ethics, which he calls the ‘ethics of conviction’ and which are concerned with the goodness of actions without regard to their consequences — Fiat justitia et pereat mundus — the politician practises relative ethics, which Weber calls ‘ethics of responsibility’, which instead of being concerned only with the goodness of actions are concerned most of all with the goodness of the consequences of the actions. However, if the essential means of politics is violence, as Weber thinks, then the politician’s calling consists of using perverse means, abiding by the ethics of responsibility, to achieve beneficial ends: from there it follows that for Weber a politician is a lost man because he cannot aspire to the salvation of his soul, because he made a pact with the devil when he made a pact with the forces of power and he’s condemned to suffer the consequences of that abominable pact. From there as well, I would add, power resembles an abrasive substance that leaves behind a wasteland, the more power accumulated the bigger the wasteland, and from there it follows that every pure politician sooner or later ends up thinking he’s sacrificed his honour and his conscience for the salvation of his country, because sooner or later he understands he’s sold his soul, and that he won’t be saved.

Suárez didn’t understand it immediately. After leaving power following the coup d’état he remained involved in politics for exactly ten years, but during that time he became a different politician; he didn’t stop being a pure politician, but he barely acted like one any more, and he began to be a politician with fewer responsibilities and more convictions — he, who as a young man had barely had any — as if he thought this last-minute change could prevent the devil from extracting his part of the deal. Around the time he presented his resignation as Prime Minister the King promised to grant him a dukedom as a reward for services rendered to the country; few people around the Zarzuela were in favour of ennobling that upstart who many thought had rebelled against the King and endangered the Crown, so the concession was postponed and, in a gesture more poignant than embarrassing — because it reveals the plebeian provincial arriviste still fighting for legitimacy and to atone for his past — Suárez demanded what he’d been promised and just two days after 23 February the monarch finally made Suárez a duke on the condition that he stayed away from politics for a while. Suárez wasted no time in accepting this degrading arrangement, having his shirts embroidered with a ducal crown and starting to use his title; these were the external signs that allowed him to nail down his interpretation of the character he’d aspired to be for some time and in a way already was: a progressive aristocrat, exactly like General Della Rovere. Perhaps less intent on his political future than on putting finishing touches to his historical figure, set on the futile proposal of merging the ethics of conviction with the ethics of responsibility, he tried to be faithful to this only partly unreal image for the rest of his political life: the image of a statesman with no ambition for power, devoted to what he then called ‘bringing ethics into politics’, preserving democracy, encouraging concord, expanding liberty and combating inequality and injustice. He didn’t always achieve his objective, sometimes through thoughtlessness, other times through spite, often through his difficulty in restraining the pure politician still inside him. Three days after the coup d’état he left for a long holiday in the United States and the Caribbean with his wife and a group of friends; it was the understandable bolting of a man undone and weary to the core, but it was also a bad way to leave the premiership, because it meant abandoning his successor: he did not hand over his powers, didn’t leave him a single suggestion or a single piece of advice, and all Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo found in his office in Moncloa was a locked safe of the ruler’s secrets but whose only contents turned out to be, as he found out after a locksmith forced it open, a piece of paper folded in four on which Suárez had written down the combination to the safe, as if he’d wanted to play a joke on his replacement or as if he’d wanted to give him a lesson on the true essence of power or as if he’d wanted to reveal that in reality he was only a chameleon-like actor without an inner life or distinct personality and a transparent being whose deepest secret was that he had no secrets.

But he didn’t just abandon his successor; he also abandoned his party. On his return from the holiday, Suárez set up a legal office with a handful of faithful from his cabinet, and for some time he made an effort to stay away from politics; the political village of Madrid facilitated his efforts: the calamity of the final months of his government and the trauma of his resignation and 23 February had made him just short of undesirable, and anybody who harboured the slightest ambition — and almost everybody who harboured none — endeavoured to keep him at a distance. His vocation, however, was much stronger than his insolvency and, in spite of the promise he’d made to the King, that period out of politics was brief and his distancing from power relative; after all he still maintained a certain control of UCD through some of his men, which didn’t prevent the Party from continuing to unhinge itself or him from watching this unhinging with a disgust mixed with vindictive rage: contrary to what so many of his fellow Party members had been predicting for a long time, it proved that his leadership had not been the cause of all the UCD’s woes; with his successor, on the other hand, the disgust was not mixed: as soon as he became Prime Minister Calvo Sotelo began to adopt measures that would root out Suárez’s policies and which he interpreted as an intolerable swing to the right. As a result of all this, within a few months of his retirement from politics Suárez began to prepare his return. By then Calvo Sotelo had removed Suárez’s supporters from the leadership of the UCD and he was feeling increasingly ill at ease in a party that rightly blamed him for its fall, so, although there were offers made for him to retake the wheel of the UCD to keep it from crashing, Suárez turned them down, and in the last days of June 1982, just three months before the general election, he announced the creation of a new party: the Centro Democrático y Social (CDS, Democratic and Social Centre).

It was his last political adventure. It was guided by a double purpose: on the one hand, to create a real party, organizationally and ideologically cohesive, as the UCD had never been; on the other hand, to promote his new principles of a progressive statesman of concord, his new political ethic of a left or centre-left aristocrat. He set up the party with hardly any resources, hardly any men, without anyone’s backing or hardly anyone’s, and less than none of the so-called powers that be, who had done everything they could to throw him out of power and contemplated the possibility of his return with horror. Far from disheartened, he was excited by this abandonment, maybe because he felt that it returned to politics an epic and aesthetic spirit that he hadn’t felt since his first months in government and had almost forgotten, authorizing him as well to present himself as a victim of the powerful and as a solitary fighter against injustice and adversity or, as he told the journalists at the presentation of the new party, as a Quixote coming out lance at the ready to take on all comers in the wind and the weather out on the road. Around that time a story was widely circulated that many consider apocryphal. The story goes that shortly before the election one of his collaborators recommended he hire an American adviser for the campaign; Suárez accepted the suggestion. Do you want to win the election? was the question the adviser asked Suárez straight away when they met. Naturally, Suárez said yes. Then let me use the film of the coup d’état, said the adviser. Show the people the empty chamber and you sitting on your bench and you’ll get an absolute majority. Suárez burst out laughing, thanked the adviser and dismissed him then and there. The anecdote resembles a vignette invented by one of Suárez’s hagiographers — to use the most devastating images of the democracy in an electoral campaign was not doing any favours to democracy, and the great man chose to wage a clean fight even at the cost of losing the election — I don’t know whether it is or not, but, if it’s true that some adviser made such a proposal to Suárez, I would bet that was his reaction: first, because he knew the adviser was mistaken and, although the image of the chamber on the evening of 23 February could have won him thousands of votes, it would never have won the election for him; and second — and especially — because, even supposing that the electoral use of those images would have won him the election, it would have ruined irredeemably the role he needed to play in order to definitively exorcize his past and fix his place in history; or to put it another way: perhaps Emmanuele Bardone would have accepted the adviser’s suggestions, but not General Della Rovere, and Suárez didn’t want anything to do with Emmanuele Bardone anymore and hadn’t for a long time.