Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

In that election he won two seats. It was a very poor result, not even enough to form his own parliamentary group in the Cortes, and relegated him to the benches reserved for the mixed group beside his eternal buddy Santiago Carrillo, who by then was prolonging his agony at the head of the PCE and never tired of laughingly repeating to him that this was how the country was paying them back for their gesture of keeping their composure on the evening of 23 February; but it was also enough of a result to allow him to play the left-wing or centre-left aristocrat and statesman of concord. He began to do so at the first opportunity: during the session of investiture for the new Prime Minister he cast his vote for Felipe González, who had been his fiercest adversary while he led the government and who didn’t even thank him for the support, undoubtedly because the absolute majority obtained by the PSOE in the elections made it superfluous. ‘We mustn’t contribute to disillusion,’ Suárez said that day from the speakers’ rostrum in the Cortes. ‘We shall not cheer this government’s possible errors. We shall not participate, neither in this chamber nor outside of it, in destabilizing operations against the government. We are not supporters of the irresponsible and dangerous game of capitalizing on the difficulties of those who hold the honourable charge of governing Spain.’ These words were met with the sonorous indifference or silent disdain of an almost empty chamber, but contained a declaration of principles and a lesson in political ethics that over the next four years he did not tire of imparting: he was not prepared to do to others what they’d done to him at the price of provoking a crisis of state like the one that had led to his resignation and to 23 February. It was a retroactive form of defence and, although nobody recognized his authority to give anybody lessons in political ethics, Suárez continued doggedly preaching his new gospel. The truth is he abided by it, in part because his parliamentary insignificance permitted it, but above all because he wanted more than anything else to be true to the idiosyncrasies of his new character. That’s how he began to forge his resurrection: little by little people began to bury the disoriented politician of the last years of his mandate and dig up the vibrant maker of democracy, and little by little, and especially as some grew disappointed with the Socialist illusion, his statesman’s gestures and rhetoric, his ethical regenerationism began to catch on and a confusing progressive discourse that allowed him to flirt with the intellectual left in the capitals, to which he always wanted to belong, as well as recover part of his attraction for the traditional right of the provinces, to which he always had belonged.

Four years after his first speech in the Cortes as an ordinary deputy he felt that the general elections were again placing him at the gates of government. They were held in June 1986 and he stood again with hardly any money or media backing, but with a radical message that undermined his adversaries and handed him millions of votes and almost twenty parliamentarians. That enlarged and unexpected triumph plunged the right into sorrow (‘If this country gives nineteen seats to Suárez there’s no hope for it,’ declared Fraga, who would give up the leadership of his party a short time later) and the left into uncertainty, finding themselves forced to take Suárez’s rise seriously, from that moment on they kept asking him to stop trying to steal their voters and to go back to his old rhetoric and his proper place on the right. If his only purpose had been to reconquer the premiership, he should have done so: with Fraga out of the picture and the so-called powers that be resigned to his return to politics, Suárez was for almost everyone the natural leader of the centre right, and therefore Fraga’s successor offered him over and over again the chance to lead the electoral ticket of a big coalition capable of defeating the Socialists. He should have done it, but he didn’t: he’d lost his youthful pure politician’s ferocity and was no longer prepared to return to government by trampling on the ideas he’d made his own; he was a conviction politician and not a piranha of power; he felt closer to the generous left that looked after the disadvantaged than to the miserly right jealous of its privileges; in short: he’d resolved to play his character to the end. Besides, after five years of political hardships, success drove him to a euphoria that at times seemed to repay the agonies of his last years in Moncloa: flourishing the idealism of his values and his real achievements against what he considered the Socialists’ wingless pragmatism and the right’s futureless impotence, as if he’d never lost his old charisma and his capacity to reconcile the irreconcilable and his historical intuition, Suárez stirred his former supporters again over the following months and attracted politicians, professionals and intellectuals of the left or the centre left, and in a very short time had established a party, with no guarantees other than the stubbornness and record of its leader, across the whole of Spain, and some could imagine him setting up a serious alternative power to Socialist power.

It’s not impossible that some symbolic triumphs of this little return to the big stage meant in secret almost more than the electoral triumphs to him. In October 1989 he was named president of the Liberal International, an organization that on his insistence changed its name to the Liberal and Progressive International: it was a recognition that the Falangist from Ávila who had been Secretary General of Franco’s single party had turned into a benchmark politician for international progressiveness, and the definitive certificate that for the world as well Emmanuele Bardone was now General Della Rovere. A tiny thing that happened in the Cortes two years earlier must have made him privately happier still. During a parliamentary debate the new leader of the right, Antonio Hernández Mancha, whose requests for support Suárez had repeatedly rejected, dedicated with the haughty irony of a state lawyer some lines of verse reworked for the occasion that he attributed to St Teresa of Ávila: ‘What have I, Adolfo, that my enmity you should seek? / What wealth from it, my Adolfo, / that before my door, covered in dew, / you spend dark winter nights in snow and sleet?’ As soon as his adversary had finished speaking, Suárez jumped up from his bench and asked for the floor: he assured the chamber that Hernández Mancha had got each and every line of the quatrain wrong, then recited them correctly to finish by saying that the author was not St Teresa but Lope de Vega; then, without another word, he sat back down. It was the scene dreamt of by any cocky provincial with a desire for revenge: he’d always been a reserved and pedestrian parliamentarian, but he’d just shamed his most direct competitor before the television cameras and in a full session of the Cortes, reminding those who for years had considered him an uneducated nonentity that perhaps he hadn’t read as much as they had but he’d read enough to do much more for the country than they’d done, and reminding them in passing that Hernández Mancha was just one more of the many good-for-nothings adorned with honorary degrees he’d measured up to in his political career and who, because they thought they knew everything, would never understand anything.

All this was a mirage, the posthumous glow of an extinguished star, the hundred days of glory of a dethroned emperor. I refuse to believe that Suárez didn’t know it; I refuse to believe that he’d returned to politics unaware that he would not be returning to power: after all very few knew as well as he did that it was perhaps impossible to bring ethics into politics without renouncing politics, because very few knew as well as he did that perhaps nobody comes to power without using dubious or dangerous or simply evil means, playing fair or trying as hard as he could to play fair to make himself an honourable place in history; I even wonder if he didn’t know more, if he didn’t at least guess, supposing that we can truly admire heroes and that they don’t make us uncomfortable or offend us by diminishing us with the emphatic anomaly of their actions, maybe we cannot admire heroes of the retreat, or not fully, and that’s why we don’t want them to govern us again once their job is completed: because we suspect that they have sacrificed their honour and their conscience, and because we have an ethic of loyalty, but we do not have an ethic of betrayal. The mirage, in any case, barely lasted a couple of years: by the third the certainty had already begun to invade the Cortes and public opinion that what Suárez called politics of state was in reality ambiguous, tricky, populist politics, seeking left-wing votes in Madrid and right-wing ones in Ávila, and which allowed him to make pacts with the left in the Cortes and with the right in the municipalities; by the fourth, after disappointing results in the general and European elections, problems arose in the Party, internal divisions, expulsions of unruly members, and the right and the left saw the long-awaited occasion to kill off a common adversary and pounced on him at the same time in pursuit of their left-wing and right-wing voters; in the fifth year came the collapse: in the regional elections of 26 May 1991 the CDS lost more than half its votes and was left out of almost all the parliaments of the autonomous regions, and that same night Suárez announced his resignation as Party leader and relinquished his seat in the Cortes. It was the end: a mediocre ending, with no grandeur or brilliance. He had no more to give: he was exhausted and disappointed, powerless to battle on inside and out of his party. He didn’t retire: they retired him. He left nothing behind: the UCD had disappeared years before, and the CDS would soon disappear. Politics is a slaughterhouse: many sighs of relief were heard, but not a single lament for his withdrawal.