The first feeling is quite accurate; the second not so much. It’s true that during the autumn and winter of 1980 the Spanish ruling class has devoted itself to a series of strange political manoeuvres with the objective of bringing down Adolfo Suárez’s government, but it’s only partly true that the attack on the Cortes and the military coup are the result of this widespread conspiracy. Two different things are involved in the 23 February coup: one is a series of political operations against Adolfo Suárez, but not against democracy, or not in principle; the other is a military operation against Adolfo Suárez and also against democracy. The two things are not entirely independent; but neither are they entirely united: the political operations were the context that fostered the military operation; they were the placenta of the coup, not the coup itself: the nuance is key in understanding the coup. For this reason we don’t need to pay too much attention to the politicians of the time who state that they knew in advance what was going to happen in the Cortes that evening, or that many people in the chamber knew, or even that the whole chamber knew; they are almost certainly fictitious, vain or self-interested memories: the truth is, since the political operation and the military operation barely communicated, nobody or almost nobody in the chamber knew, and very few people outside knew.
What everyone in the whole country did know was that a coup d’état was in the air that winter. On 20 February, three days before the coup, Ricardo Paseyro, Madrid correspondent for Paris Match, wrote: ‘Spain’s economic situation is verging on catastrophe, terrorism is on the rise, scepticism towards institutions and their representatives is profoundly damaging the soul of the nation, the state is collapsing beneath the assault of feudalism and the excesses on the part of the autonomous governments, and Spain’s foreign policy is a fiasco.’ He concluded: ‘There is the scent of a coup d’état, a golpe de estado, in the air.’ Everyone knew what could happen, but no one or almost no one knew when, how and where; as for who, prospective candidates to carry out a coup d’état were not exactly in short supply in the Army, although it’s certain that as soon as Lieutenant Colonel Tejero burst into the chamber everyone or almost every one of the deputies must have recognized him immediately, because his face had been in the newspapers ever since mid-November 1978 when Diario 16 broke the news that he had been arrested for planning a coup based on taking the government hostage when the Cabinet was meeting at Moncloa and using the resulting power vacuum as an excuse to take over control of the state; after his arrest, Tejero was put on trial, but the military tribunal ended up imposing a laughable sentence and a few months later he was already at liberty and available for duty, that is without a concrete professional assignment, that is without any occupation other than making preparations for his second attempt with maximum discretion and the minimum number of people, which ought to prevent the leak that made the first one fall through. So, in the most absolute secrecy, counting on a very reduced number of military conspirators and with a very high degree of improvisation, the coup was hatched, and this explains to a great extent how, of all the threatened coups looming over Spanish democracy since the previous summer, this was the one that finally materialized.
The threats against Spanish democracy, however, had not begun the previous summer. A long time after Suárez left power a journalist asked him at what moment did he begin to suspect that a coup d’état might be in the works. ‘From the moment I gained the use of prime ministerial reason,’ Suárez answered. He wasn’t lying. Less than an accident of history, in Spain the golpe de estado is a vernacular rite: all democratic experiments in Spain have been finished by coups d’état, and in the last two centuries there have been more than fifty; the last had been in 1936, five years after the installation of the Republic; 1981 was also five years since the starting point of the democratic process; combined with the difficult time the country was going through, that chance turned into a numerical superstition and that numerical superstition gnawed away at the coup d’état psychosis among the ruling class. But it was not just a psychosis, nor just a superstition. In reality, Suárez had even more reasons than any other democratic Spanish Prime Minister to fear a coup d’état from the very moment when he showed by his actions that his intention was not, as might have seemed at the beginning of his mandate, to change something so everything would stay the same, prolonging the content of Francoism by airbrushing its form, but to restore a political regime essentially similar to the one against which forty years before Franco and the Army had risen up in arms: it was not just that when Suárez came to power the Armed Forces were almost uniformly Francoist; they were, by Franco’s explicit mandate, the guardians of Francoism. The most famous phrase of the transition from dictatorship to democracy (‘Everything is tied up and well tied’) was not spoken by any of the protagonists of the transition; it was spoken by Franco, which perhaps suggests that Franco was the true protagonist of the transition, or at least one of the protagonists. Everyone remembers that phrase spoken on 30 December 1969 in his year-end speech, and everyone interprets it for what it is: a guarantee issued by the dictator to his faithful that after his death everything would carry on exactly as it was before his death or that, as the Falangist intellectual Jesús Fueyo put it, ‘after Franco, the institutions’; not everyone remembers, on the other hand, that seven years before Franco pronounced an almost identical phrase (‘Everything is tied up and guaranteed’) during a speech to an assembly of Civil War veterans gathered at Garabitas Hill, and on that occasion he added: ‘Under the faithful and insurmountable guardianship of our Armed Forces.’ It was an order: after his death, the Army’s mission was to preserve Francoism. But shortly before he died Franco gave the military a different order in his will, and it was that they should obey the King with the same loyalty with which they’d obeyed him. Of course, neither Franco nor the military imagined that the two orders could come to be contradictory and, when the political reforms brought the country into democracy demonstrating that indeed they were, because the King was deserting Francoism, the majority of military officers wavered: they had to choose between obeying Franco’s first order, preventing democracy by force, and obeying the second, accepting that it contradicted and annulled the first, and consequently accepting democracy. That wavering is one of the keys to 23 February; it also explains that almost from the very moment he reached the premiership in July 1976 Suárez would live surrounded by rumours of a coup d’état. At the beginning of 1981 the rumours were no more tenacious than they had been in January or April of 1977, but never had the political situation been as favourable for a coup as it was then.
From the summer of 1980 the country is in an ever deepening crisis. Many share the Paris Match correspondent’s diagnosis: the economy is in bad shape, the decentralization of the state is dismasting the state and exasperating the Army, Suárez is proving incapable of governing while his party is disintegrating and the opposition is hard at work trying to bury him once and for all, the inaugural charm of democracy seems to have vanished in a few years and on the streets one senses a mixture of insecurity, pessimism and fear;* furthermore, there is terrorism, especially ETA terrorism, which is reaching unprecedented levels while venting its anger on the Civil Guard and the rest of the Armed Forces. The outlook is alarming, and talk begins to circulate of finding emergency solutions: not only from the eternal advocators of a military coup – unrepentant Francoists stripped of their privileges who fan the flames with daily patriotic harangues in the barracks – but also people of long-standing democratic affiliation, like Josep Tarradellas, an old Republican politician and former premier of the autonomous Catalan government who since the summer of 1979 had been asking for ‘a touch on the rudder’ to get the misdirected democracy back on course and who in July 1980 demanded ‘a surgical coup to straighten the country out’. Touch on the rudder, surgical coup, change of course: this is the fearful terminology that impregnated conversations from the summer of 1980 in the hallways of the Cortes, dinners, lunches and political discussions and newspaper and magazine articles in the political village of Madrid. Such expressions are simple euphemisms, or rather empty concepts, which everyone fills in according to their own interests, and which, aside from the resonances of coups they evoke, have only one point in common: for the Francoists as much as for the democrats, for Blas Piñar’s or Girón de Velasco’s ultraright-wingers as much as for Felipe González’s Socialists and many of Santiago Carrillo’s Communists and many of Suárez’s own centrists, the only one to blame for that crisis is Adolfo Suárez, and the first condition for ending the crisis is to get him out of government. It is a legitimate and sensible wish, because for a long time before the summer Suárez has been an ineffective politician; but politics is also a matter of form – especially the politics of a democracy with many enemies inside and outside the Army, a recently unveiled democracy, the rules of which are still being rolled out and no one has yet mastered, and whose seams are still extremely fragile – and here the problem is not one of content, but of form: the problem was not getting rid of Suárez, but how to get rid of Suárez. The answer the Spanish ruling class should have given to this question is the only answer possible in a democracy as frail as that of 1981: through elections; this was not the answer the Spanish ruling class gave to the question and the answer was practically unvarying: at any price. It was a savage answer, to a great extent the result of arrogance, avarice for power and the immaturity of a ruling class that would rather run the risk of creating conditions favourable to the conduct of the saboteurs of democracy than continue tolerating the presence of the intolerable Adolfo Suárez in the government. There is no other way to explain that from the summer of 1980 onward politicians, businessmen, labour and Church leaders and journalists were deliriously exaggerating the gravity of the situation to be able to play daily with constitutionally questionable solutions that made the already stumbling government of the country stumble, inventing unparliamentary short cuts, threatening to jam the new institutional gears and creating a chaos that constituted the ideal fuel for a possible coup. In the great sewer of Madrid, which is how Suárez referred to the political village of Madrid during that time, those solutions – those surgical coups or touches on the rudder, those changes of course – were no secret to anyone, and rare was the day when the press made no mention of one of them, almost always to encourage it: one day they spoke of a caretaker government led by Alfonso Osorio – right-wing deputy and Deputy Prime Minister of Suárez’s first government – and the next day they talked about an interim government led by José María de Areilza – also a right-winger and Minister of Foreign Affairs in the King’s first government – one day they were talking about Operación Quirinal, bound to make Landelino Lavilla – Speaker of the Cortes and leader of the Christian Democrat sector of Suárez’s party – Prime Minister of a coalition government and the next day they were talking about Operation de Gaulle, to make a prestigious military officer leader of a government of national unity, Álvaro Lacalle Leloup or Jesús González del Yerro or Alfonso Armada, the King’s former secretary and eventual leader of the 23 February coup attempt; barely a week went by without voices that disagreed over just about everything coming together to agree on their demand for a strong government, which was interpreted by many as a demand for a government led by a military man or involving military officers, a government that would protect the Crown from the turbulence, that would correct the chaos of improvisation with which they had made the change from dictatorship to democracy and would put a stop to what some called its excesses, check the spread of terrorism, resuscitate the economy, rationalize the regional autonomy process and make the country calm again. It was a daily jumble of proposals, gossip and secret meetings, and on 2 December 1980 Joaquín Aguirre Bellver, parliamentary reporter for the far-right paper El Alcázar, described the political atmosphere in the Cortes: ‘A Turkish-style coup, interim government, coalition government . . . A horse race à la General Pavía [. . .] At this stage anybody who doesn’t have his own formula for the coup is a nobody. Meanwhile, Suárez walks the corridors alone, and no one pays him any attention.’ Working things to the advantage of a coup, Aguirre Bellver conscientiously blends military coups in his list – the one led by General Evren a short time ago in Turkey or the one led by General Pavía in Spain a little more than a century before – with theoretically constitutional political operations. It was a deceitful, lethal blend; out of this blend arose 23 February: the political operations were the placenta that nourished the coup, supplying arguments and alibis; to openly discuss the possibility of offering the government to a military man or of asking the military for help in order to escape from the mess, the ruling class half opened the door of politics to an army clamouring to intervene in politics to destroy democracy, and on 23 February the Army burst through that door en masse. As for Suárez, the description Aguirre Bellver gives of him in the winter of the coup is very exact, and inevitably makes one think that the image of his solitary figure in the corridors of the Cortes prefigures his solitary image in the chamber during the evening of 23 February: it is the image of a lost man and a written-off politician who in the months before the coup feels that the entire political class, the entire ruling class of the country, is plotting against him. He is not the only one to feel this way: ‘we’re all plotting’ is the headline of an article published at the beginning of December in the newspaper ABC by Pilar Urbano in which she refers to the machinations against Suárez by a group of journalists, businessmen, diplomats and politicians of various parties dining together in the capital. He is not the only one to feel this: in the great sewer of Madrid, in the political village, many feel that the whole of reality is plotting against Adolfo Suárez, and during the autumn and winter of 1980 there is barely a single member of the ruling class who consciously or unconsciously does not add his grain of sand to the great mountain of the conspiracy. Or what Suárez feels as a conspiracy.
* The word of the moment is disenchantment; if it made its fortune as a description of the time it’s because it reflected a reality: in the second half of 1976, shortly after Suárez came to power, 78 per cent of Spaniards preferred political decisions to be made by representatives elected by the people, and in 1978, the year the Constitution was approved, 77 per cent defined themselves as unconditional democrats; but, according to the Metroscopia Institute, in 1980 barely half of Spaniards preferred democracy over any other form of government: the rest had doubts or didn’t care, or supported a return to dictatorship.