It’s a whim, maybe it’s not truthfully imagined, but the reality is the two were much more than accomplices: the reality is that by February 1981 Santiago Carrillo and Adolfo Suárez had spent four years tied by an alliance that was political but was also more than political, and which only Suárez’s illness and loss would finally break.
History fabricates strange figures, frequently resigns itself to sentimentalism and does not disdain the symmetries of fiction, as if it wanted to endow itself with meaning that on its own it did not possess. Who could have predicted that the change from dictatorship to democracy in Spain would not be plotted by the democratic parties, but by the Falangists and the Communists, irreconcilable enemies of democracy and each other’s irreconcilable enemies during three years of war and forty post-war years? Who would have predicted that the Secretary General of the Communist Party in exile would set himself up as the most faithful political ally of the last Secretary General of the Movimiento, the single fascist party? Who could have imagined that Santiago Carrillo would end up turning into an unconditional protector of Adolfo Suárez and into one of his last friends and confidants? No one did, but maybe it wasn’t impossible to do: on the one hand, because only irreconcilable enemies could reconcile the irreconcilable Spain of Franco; on the other, because unlike Gutiérrez Mellado and Adolfo Suárez, who were profoundly different in spite of their superficial similarities, Santiago Carrillo and Adolfo Suárez were profoundly similar in spite of their superficial differences. The two of them were both pure politicians, more than professionals of politics they were professionals of power, because neither of the two conceived of politics without power or because both acted as if politics were to power what gravity is to the earth; both were bureaucrats who had prospered in the inflexible hierarchy of political organizations ruled by totalitarian methods and inspired by totalitarian ideologies; both were democratic converts, belated and a bit forced; both were long accustomed to giving orders: Suárez had held his first political post in 1955, when he was twenty-three, and since then had risen step by step up all the rungs of the Movimiento ladder until reaching its top and becoming Prime Minister; Carrillo had spent more than three decades dominating the Communist Party with the authority of the high priest of a clandestine religion, but before his twentieth birthday he was already leader of the Socialist Youth, when barely twenty-one he became Councillor for Public Order of the Defence Junta of Madrid at one of the most urgent moments of the war, at twenty-two he’d become a member of the politburo of the PCE and from there on never stopped monopolizing positions of responsibility in the Party and the Communist International. The parallels don’t stop there: both cultivated a personal vision of politics, at once epic and aesthetic, as if, rather than the slow, collective and laborious work of bending reality’s resistance, politics were a solitary adventure dotted with dramatic episodes and intrepid decisions; both had been educated in the street, lacked any university training and distrusted intellectuals; both were so tough they almost always felt invulnerable to the inclemencies of their trade and both possessed uncomplicated ambition, unlimited confidence in themselves, a changeable lack of scruples and a recognized talent for political sleight of hand and for the conversion of their defeats into victories. In short: deep down they seem like twin politicians. In 1983, when after the coup d’état neither Carrillo nor Suárez were what they had been any more and were trying to mend their political careers in fits and starts, Fernando Claudín – one of Carrillo’s closest friends and collaborators for over thirty years of Communist militancy – wrote the following about the eternal Secretary General: ‘He lacked the least bit of knowledge of political and constitutional law, and made no efforts to acquire any. Economics, sociology and other subjects that might have allowed him to express fully formed opinions on most parliamentary debates were not his strong suits either [. . .] His only speciality was “politics in general”, which tends to translate as talking a little bit about everything without going into anything in depth, and the Party machinery, in which, of course, no one could hold a candle to him. As had always happened to him, he couldn’t find time to study, always absorbed by Party meetings, interviews, secret discussions, delegations and other such activities. The iron will he showed for other tasks, especially holding on to power within the Party and making his way towards it in the state, unfortunately failed him when it came to acquiring education that would have stood him in better stead in the exercise of these functions.’ Twin politicians: if we admit that Claudín is right and that the previous quote defines some of Santiago Carrillo’s weaknesses, then we just need to replace Party with the word Movimiento for it to define also some of Adolfo Suárez’s weaknesses.
It’s possible that these similarities were blindingly obvious to both as soon as they met at the end of February 1977, but it’s certain that neither of the two would have sealed the pact they sealed with the other had they not both understood long before that they needed each other to prevail in politics, because at that moment Suárez had the power of Francoism but Carrillo had the legitimacy of anti-Francoism, and Suárez needed legitimacy as much as Carrillo needed power; something else is certain: since they were both pure politicians, they would not have sealed that pact if they hadn’t believed that the country could do without their individual alliance, but not that of the collective alliance between the two irreconcilable Spains they represented, and which also needed each other. In spite of that, one might well assume that for Suárez, raised in the Manichaean claustrophobia of the dictatorship, it would be surprising to recognize his intimate kinship with the dictatorship’s official bad guy; one might also assume that Carrillo’s surprise would be even greater upon realizing that a young provincial Falangist was competing advantageously with the skill of an experienced old politician – whose heroic reputation in war and exile, international prestige and absolute power in the Party lent him the image of a demigod – forcing him to liquidate in a few months the strategy for post-Francoism he’d planned and maintained for years and to follow the path the younger man had marked out.
The story of that liquidation and its consequences is in part the story of the change from dictatorship to democracy and without it the unbreakable link between Santiago Carrillo and Adolfo Suárez that lasted for years cannot be understood; neither can 23 February; nor, perhaps, the twin gesture of these two twins on the evening of 23 February, while the bullets whizzed around the chamber of the Cortes. The story begins at some moment in 1976. Let’s say it begins on 3 July 1976, the same day the King appoints Adolfo Suárez Prime Minister amid generalized stupor. By then, after thirty-six years of exile, Santiago Carrillo had been living clandestinely in Madrid for six months, in a house on the Viso housing estate, convinced that he needed to gauge the country’s reality and cement his hold on the Party within the country so the Communists would be able to assert themselves as the most numerous, most active and best organized political force of opposition to the regime in the emerging post-Francoism. By then exactly a year had gone by since Carrillo initiated the dismantling or undermining or ideological demolition of the PCE with the aim of presenting it to Spanish society as a modern party free of the old Stalinist dogmatism: in July 1975 along with Enrico Berlinguer and Georges Marchais – leaders of the Italian and French Communists – he’d founded Euro-Communism, an ambiguous and heterodox version of Communism that proclaimed its independence from the Soviet Union, its rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its respect for parliamentary democracy. By then it had been exactly three decades since the PCE had elaborated the so-called policy of national reconciliation, which in practice meant that the Party renounced the aim of overthrowing the regime by force and was confident that a non-violent national strike could paralyse the country so that power would be handed over to a provisional government composed of all the parties of the democratic opposition, whose first task would be to call free elections. By then, however, Carrillo had already become aware that, in spite of this still being official Party policy, the anti-Francoist organizations on their own lacked the strength to finish off the prolongation of Francoism embodied at that moment by the monarchy; he was no less aware, if the objective was bloodlessly to install a democracy in Spain, sooner or later the political parties of the opposition would have to end up negotiating with reform-inclined representatives of the regime – now that they could no longer break Francoism to impose democracy they had to negotiate the rupture of Francoism with Francoists lucid enough or resigned enough to accept that the only future for Francoism was democracy – a change of strategy that did not begin to be glimpsed in official PCE doctrine until the beginning of 1976 when the Secretary General introduced a terminological nuance into his speech and stopped talking about the ‘democratic rupture’ to talk about the ‘negotiated rupture’.
So, Carrillo received the unexpected news of Suárez’s appointment at a moment of total uncertainty and certain despondency, knowing that, although it seemed strong, his party was still weak, and that, although it seemed weak, Francoism was still strong. His response to the news was as unexpected as the news itself, or at least it was for the officials and members of his party, which like the democratic opposition and regime’s reformers and the majority of public opinion considered the choice of the last Secretary General of the Movimiento meant the end of their liberalizing hopes and the triumph of the reactionaries of the regime. On 7 July, four days after the appointment of Suárez and barely a few hours after he announced on television that his government’s aim was to achieve democratic normalization (‘That the governments of the future may be the result of the free will of the Spanish people,’ he’d said), Carrillo published in the weekly Mundo Obrero, clandestine organ of the PCE, an article full of benevolent scepticism towards the new Prime Minister: he didn’t believe that Suárez was capable of fulfilling his promises, he wasn’t even sure if they were sincere, but he recognized that his language and tone were not those of a usual Falangist leader and that his good proposals deserved to be given the benefit of the doubt. ‘The Suárez government,’ he concluded, ‘could serve to bring about the negotiation that leads to the agreed rupture.’
Carrillo’s prediction was spot on. Or almost: Suárez not only brought about the negotiation that led to the rupture; he also formulated it in terms no one was expecting: for Carrillo, for the democratic opposition, for the regime’s reformers, the political dilemma of post-Francoism consisted in choosing between the reform of Francoism, changing its form but not its content, and the rupture with Francoism, changing its form to change its content; Suárez took only months to decide the dilemma was false: he understood that in politics the form is the content, and therefore it was possible to realize a reform of Francoism that was in practice a rupture with Francoism. He understood gradually, as he came to understand that it was imperative to break with Francoism, but as soon as he took up his post and made a programmatic declaration in which he announced free elections before 30 June of the coming year Suárez began a cautious series of interviews with the leaders of the illegal opposition to sound out their intentions and explain his project. Carrillo remained on the sidelines; at that moment Suárez was in a hurry for everything, except for talking to Carrillo: although he sensed that without the Communists his political reform lacked credibility, for the moment he was not suggesting the legalization of the Party, maybe especially because he was sure that would be an unacceptable measure for the Francoist mentality of the Army and of the social sectors he needed to shepherd towards democracy or towards some form of democracy. Carrillo, however, was in a hurry to talk to him: Suárez had promised in his first speech as Prime Minister to meet with all the political forces, but the promise hadn’t been kept and, although he still didn’t know if Suárez really meant to break with Francoism or simply reform it, Carrillo did not want to run the risk that the country might be heading for some form of democracy without the presence of the Communists, because he thought that would indefinitely prolong the Party’s clandestinity and condemn it to ostracism and maybe extinction. So in the middle of August Carrillo takes the initiative and a little while later manages to get in contact with Suárez through José Mario Armero, head of the news agency Europe Press. The first interview between Carrillo and Armero is held in Cannes, at the end of August; the second is held in Paris at the beginning of September. Neither of the two encounters produces concrete results (Armero assures Carrillo that Suárez is heading for democracy and asks him for patience: conditions are not yet right for legalizing the PCE; Carrillo offers his help in constructing the new system, does not demand the immediate legalization of his party and claims that it won’t reject the monarchy if it amounts to an authentic democracy); but neither of the two encounters is a failure. On the contrary: starting in September and all through the autumn and winter of 1976 Carrillo and Suárez remain in contact through Armero and Jaime Ballesteros, Carrillo’s right-hand man in the PCE leadership. And that’s when a strange complicity begins to tie them together through the intervening persons: like two blind men touching each other’s features in search of a face, for months Carrillo and Suárez put their proposals, their loyalty, their intelligence and their cleverness to the test, they glimpse common interests, discover secret affinities, admit they should understand each other; both understand that they need democracy to survive and that they need each other, because neither of the two holds the key to democracy but each of them holds a part – Suárez has power, Carrillo legitimacy – which completes what the other holds: while he insists over and over again on speaking to him in person, Carrillo realizes with increasing clarity the difficulties Suárez is facing, the biggest of which stems from the resistance of a powerful section of the country to the legalization of the PCE; while the social pressure in favour of a democratic regime pushes him day by day to recognize that Francoism is only reformable with a reform that means its rupture and begins to dismantle the framework of the regime and holds dialogues with the leaders of the rest of the opposition political forces – on whom he absolutely does not press the legalization of the PCE: in general they don’t believe in running any risk that might endanger the promised elections – Suárez understands with increasing clarity that there will be no credible democracy without the Communists and that Carrillo is keeping his party under control, has retired his revolutionary ideals and is ready to make as many concessions as might be necessary to get the PCE into the new political system. From a distance, the two men’s initial caution and mutual distrust begin to dissolve; in fact, it’s possible that towards the end of October or beginning of November Suárez and Carrillo were outlining a strategy to legalize the Party, an implicit strategy, elaborated not with words but with inferences, that would turn out to be a total success for Suárez and only a relative success for Carrillo, who accepts it because he has no alternative, because by this stage he has already assumed the form of political change that Suárez is proposing to be valid and because he entertains the hope that his success will also be total.
The strategy has two parts. On the one hand, Suárez will do his best to legalize the PCE before the elections in exchange for Carrillo persuading the Communists to forget their aim of a frontal rupture with Francoism and that they’ll only achieve legitimacy and will only construct a democracy through the reform of the Francoist institutions that the government is brewing, because that reform is in practice a rupture; Carrillo immediately fulfils this part of the deal: in a clandestine meeting of the executive committee of the PCE held on 21 November, the Secretary General discards the Party’s tactical programme during Francoism, convincing his people that neither a democratic rupture nor an agreed rupture is any longer any use but only the reforming rupture proposed by Suárez. The second part of the strategy is more complex and more dangerous, and maybe therefore satisfies Carrillo’s and Suárez’s intimate propensity for politics as an adventure. In order to legalize the PCE, Suárez needs Carrillo’s party to oblige the government to increase the margin of tolerance for the Communists, to make them increasingly visible, to give them their naturalization papers with the aim of getting the majority of citizens of the country to understand that not only are they harmless for the future democracy, but that the future democracy cannot be constructed without them. This progressive de facto legalization, that should facilitate the de jure legalization, took the form of a duel between the government and the Communists in which the Communists didn’t want to finish off the government and the government didn’t want to finish off the Communists, and in which both knew in advance (or at least suspected or guessed) when and where they were going to hit their adversary: the blows of this false duel were blows for propaganda effect that included a general strike that did not manage to paralyse the country but did put the government in a tight spot, massive sales of Mundo Obrero on the streets of Madrid and massive distribution of Party membership cards, French and Swedish television reports showing Carrillo driving through the centre of the capital, a notorious clandestine press conference in which the Secretary General of the PCE – along with Dolores Ibárruri, the myth par excellence of the anti-Francoist resistance, demonized or idealized in equal measure by a great part of the population – announced between conciliating words that he’d been in Madrid for months and had no plans to leave, and finally the arrest of Carrillo himself, who once in prison the government could no longer expel from the country without breaking the law and could not keep hold of either in the midst of the national and international scandal occasioned by his capture, so that a few days later Carrillo was set free and converted into a Spanish citizen with full rights.
It was a step with no way back towards the legalization of the PCE: once forced to legalize the Secretary General, the legalization of the Party was just a matter of time. Carrillo knew it and so did Suárez; but Suárez had time and Carrillo did not: the legalization of the rest of the parties had begun to happen at the beginning of January, and he was still not sure that Suárez would fulfil his part of the deal, or that he wouldn’t postpone his fulfilment until after the elections, or that he wouldn’t postpone it indefinitely. By the middle of January Carrillo urgently needed to dispel Suárez’s doubts, but it was reality that dispelled them for him, because that was when a lethal confusion of fear and violence took over Madrid, and when the false duel the two were engaged in was on the verge of ending because the whole country was on the verge of exploding. At a quarter to eleven on the night of 24 January, when Carrillo had been legally residing in Spain for less than a month, five partners of a Communist law firm are gunned down by a far-right hit squad in their office at 55 Calle Atocha. It was the macabre apotheosis of two days of carnage. On the morning of the previous day another far-right gunman had shot a student to death during a demonstration in favour of an amnesty law, and that same afternoon a student died as the result of the impact of a smoke canister launched by the forces of Public Order against a group of people protesting the previous day’s death, while just a few hours earlier the GRAPO – an ultraleft terrorist group that since 11 December had been holding Antonio María de Oriol y Urquijo, one of the most powerful, affluent and influential representatives of orthodox Francoism – kidnapped General Emilio Villaescusa, president of the Military Supreme Court. Four days later GRAPO was still going to murder two more national policemen and a Civil Guard, but on the night of the 24th Madrid is already living in an almost pre-war atmosphere: explosions and gunshots are heard in different spots around the capital, and ultraright gangs sow terror in the streets. Added to the other episodes of those bloody days, the slaughter of its Atocha members marks for the PCE a brutal challenge destined to provoke a violent response in its ranks that, provoking in its turn a violent response from the Army, would abort the incipient democratic reforms; but the Communists do not respond: the executive committee orders its members to avoid any demonstration or confrontation in the streets and to display all the serenity possible, and the order is carried out to the letter. After arduous negotiations with the government – which fears that any spark will ignite the conflagration the far right is seeking – the Party obtains permission to install a funeral shrine for the lawyers in the Palace of Justice on the Plaza de las Salesas, and also for the coffins to be carried on the shoulders of their comrades to the Plaza de Colón. And so they do just after four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon; the television cameras film a spectacle that overwhelms the centre of Madrid; the images have been shown many times: in the midst of a sea of red roses and closed fists and a silence and order imposed by the Party leadership and respected by the rank and file with a discipline honed in clandestinity, tens of thousands of people overflow the Plaza de las Salesas and the adjacent streets to pay their last respects to the murdered men; some stills show Santiago Carrillo walking among the crowd, guarded by a wall of militants. The ceremony ends without a single incident, in the same great silence in which it began, converted into a proclamation of concord that dispels all the government’s doubts about the PCE’s repudiation of violence and spreads a wave of solidarity with Party members all over the country.
According to his then closest collaborators, it’s very possible that Suárez secretly made the decision to legalize the Communist Party that very day; if so, it’s very possible that on that very day Suárez decided that before doing so he’d need to meet their leader in person. The fact is that barely a month later, on 27 February, the two men met in a house near Madrid belonging to their mediator, José Mario Armero. The encounter was organized in the strictest confidence: although for Carrillo it entailed no danger, for Suárez it entailed plenty, and for that reason two of the three people he consulted – his Deputy Prime Minister, Alfonso Osorio, and Torcuato Fernández Miranda, President of the Cortes and of the Council of the Kingdom and his political mentor for the last few years – strongly advised him against it, reasoning that if his meeting with the clandestine Communist leader came to be known the political earthquake would be formidable; but the King’s support of Suárez, his faith in Carrillo’s discretion and his trust in his lucky star and in his talent to seduce persuaded him to run the risk. He was not mistaken. Years later Suárez and Carrillo both described the encounter as love at first sight: it may well have been, but the truth is that necessity had united them long before they met; it may well have been, but the truth is that for the seven consecutive hours their face-to-face meeting lasted, while they smoked cigarette after cigarette in the presence of Armero and in the silence of an uninhabited country house, Carrillo and Suárez behaved like two blind men who’ve suddenly recovered their sight to recognize a twin, or like two duellists who exchange a false duel for a real duel into which both are putting their all to break their rival’s spell. The winner was Suárez, who as soon as the first handshake and jokes of introductions were concluded disarmed Carrillo by telling him of his Republican grandfather, his Republican father, the Republican dead of his family on the losing side of the war, and then finished him off with protests of modesty and praise of Carrillo’s political experience and top-class statesmanship; defeated, Carrillo offered words of understanding, realism and caution designed to try once more to convince his interlocutor that he and his party not only were not a danger to his democracy project, but with time would turn into its principal guarantee of success. The rest of the interview was devoted to talking a little bit about everything and not committing to anything except to continue to back each other up and consult each other on important decisions, and when the two men went their separate ways in the early hours of the morning neither of them harboured the slightest doubt: both could rely on the other’s loyalty; both were the only two real politicians in the country; both, once the PCE was legalized, the elections held and democracy installed, would end up together holding the reins of the future.
Events wasted no time in eroding this triple certainty, but it continued ruling Suárez’s and Carrillo’s behaviour for the four years that Suárez remained in government; nothing provided it with as much consistency as the way in which the Communist Party was finally legalized. It happened on Saturday 9 April, just over a month after the meeting between the two leaders, in the middle of the chaos of the Easter holiday and after which Suárez, knowing that public opinion had swiftly changed in favour of the measure he was getting ready to adopt, still sought to protect himself against the predictable outrage of the military and the far right with a legal report from the Junta de Fiscales (Attorney General’s office) supporting the legalization; Carrillo also protected him, or did what he could to protect him. On Suárez’s advice, the Secretary General had gone on vacation to Cannes, where he heard that very Saturday morning from José Mario Armero that the legalization was effective immediately and that Suárez asked two things of him: the first was that, in order not to irritate the Army and the far right still further, the Party should celebrate without raucousness; the second was that, in order to prevent the Army and the far right being able to accuse Suárez of complicity with the Communists, once the news was broadcast Carrillo should issue a public statement criticizing Suárez or at least distancing himself from him. Carrillo complied: the Communists celebrated the news discreetly and its Secretary General appeared that very day before the press to say a few words he’d agreed with the Prime Minister. ‘I don’t believe Prime Minister Suárez to be a friend of the Communists,’ proclaimed Carrillo. ‘I consider him rather to be anti-Communist, but an intelligent anti-Communist who has understood that ideas are not destroyed with repression and banning. And who is ready to confront ours with his own.’ It was not enough. During the days following the legalization a coup d’état seemed imminent. Suárez appealed to Carrillo again; Carrillo again complied. At midday on 14 April, while the first legal meeting of the central committee of the PCE in Spain since the end of the Civil War is being held on Calle Capitán Haya Santiago, José Mario Armero summons Jaime Ballesteros, his contact with the Communists, to the café of a nearby hotel. Right now Suárez’s head is not worth a cent, Armero tells Ballesteros. The military is on the verge of rising in revolt. Either you give us a hand or we’re all going to hell. Ballesteros speaks to Carrillo, and the next day, during the second stage of the central committee meeting, the Secretary General interrupts the session to make a dramatic statement. ‘We find ourselves today in the most difficult meeting we’ve had since the war,’ says Carrillo in the midst of a glacial silence. ‘In these hours, I’m not saying these days, these hours, it may be decided whether we move towards democracy or if we go into a very serious regression that will affect not only the Party and all the democratic forces of opposition, but also the reformist and institutional forces . . . I don’t believe I’m being overly dramatic, I’m saying what’s happening at this minute.’ Immediately and without giving anyone time to react, as if he’d written it himself Carrillo reads a piece of paper perhaps drafted by the Prime Minister that Armero had handed to Ballesteros and which contains the solemn and unconditional renunciation of some of the symbols that have represented the Party since it was founded as well as the approval of some the Army considers threatened by its legalization: the red-and-yellow flag, the unity of the fatherland and the monarchy. Perplexed and fearful, used to obeying their leader unquestioningly, the members of the central committee approve the revolution imposed by Carrillo and the Party hastens to announce the good news at a press conference during which its leadership council appears in front of a surprising, enormous, improvised monarchist flag.
The coup d’état does not materialize, although the 23 February coup began to be hatched then – because the military never forgave Suárez for legalizing the Communist Party and from that moment on did not stop plotting against the treacherous Prime Minister – but the PCE could only digest such pragmatism and so many concessions snatched from them by the threat of a coup d’état with much difficulty. According to Carrillo’s predictions, the result of his pact of prudence over the last year and of half a century’s monopoly of anti-Francoism would be an electoral triumph of millions of votes that would turn his party into the second biggest in the country after Suárez’s party and would turn him and Suárez into the two great protagonists of democracy; it didn’t happen like that: like a mummy that disintegrates on exhumation, in the elections of 15 June 1977 the PCE received just over 9 per cent of the vote, less than half of what they expected and less than a third of that of the PSOE, which surprisingly took over the leadership of the left because it was able to absorb the caution and disenchantment of many Communist sympathizers and also because it offered an image of youth and modernity in contrast to the old candidates of the PCE coming back from exile, the Communist old guard starting with Carrillo himself who evoked for voters the frightening past of the war and blocked the renovation of the Party by the young Communists from inside the country. Although Carrillo never felt defeated, Suárez had won again: for the Prime Minister the legalization of the PCE was an unqualified success, because it made democracy credible by integrating the Communists, blocked the man he considered his most dangerous rival at the polls and gained him a lasting ally; for the Communists’ Secretary General it was not a failure, but nor was it the success he’d hoped for: although the legalization of the PCE assured that Suárez’s reform truly was a rupture with Francoism and that the consequence of the rupture would be a real democracy, the things they were forced to concede by the way it was carried out, abandoning the symbols and diluting the traditional postulates of the organization, made the dream of making the Communist Party the hegemonic party of the left even more distant. The response of the PCE to this electoral fiasco was what was maybe to be expected from an organization marked by a history of assent to the dictates of its Secretary General and imbued with its unappeasable historic mission of an ideology in retreat: instead of admitting their errors in the light of reality with the aim of correcting them, they attributed their own errors to reality. The Party convinced itself (or more precisely the Secretary General convinced the Party) that it hadn’t been them but the voters who’d been mistaken: two short months of legality had not been able to counteract forty years of anti-Communist propaganda, but the PSOE would waste no time in demonstrating their immaturity and inconsistency and the following elections would return to the PCE their rightful role of first party of the opposition that the Socialists had usurped, given that in Spain there were no serious parties other than the PCE and the UCD or any real political leaders other than Santiago Carrillo and Adolfo Suárez.
Unexpectedly, after the first elections Carrillo’s predictions seemed to be starting to come true and he could for a time dazzle his comrades with the illusion that the defeat had in reality been a victory or the best preparation for victory. ‘Of all the Spanish political leaders,’ wrote Le Monde in October 1977, ‘Santiago Carrillo is undoubtedly the one who has come to the fore most rapidly and with most authority in recent months.’ That’s how it was: in a very short time, all over the country, Carrillo won a vigorous reputation as a responsible politician who contributed to making the PCE appear to be a solid party capable of governing and that deserved much greater relevance than its poor electoral results seemed to indicate. His understanding with Suárez was perfect, and his whole political strategy of those years revolved around a proposal that meant to institutionalize it and to armour-plate the democracy they would construct between the two of them or that he thought they should construct between the two of them: the government of national unity. The formula resembled in name only what the majority of the ruling class was discussing or sponsoring in the months before 23 February (and which facilitated it): this was no government headed by a soldier but a government headed by Suárez and supported by the UCD and the PCE although with the cooperation of other political parties; according to Carrillo, only the fortitude of a government like that could bring stability to the country while they drew up the Constitution, strengthened democracy and warded off the danger of a coup d’état, and the Pacts of Moncloa – an important ensemble of social and economic measures designed to overcome the national economic crisis stemming from the first worldwide oil crisis, negotiated by Carrillo and Suárez and then signed by the main political parties and ratified by the Cortes in October 1977 – constituted for the Secretary General of the PCE the foretaste of this unitary government. Carrillo reiterated his proposal over and over again and, although at some moment he had hints that Suárez was thinking of accepting it, the government of national unity never came to be formed: it’s very possible that Suárez would have happily governed along with Carrillo, but he probably never considered it seriously, maybe because he feared the reaction of the military and of a large part of society. In spite of that, Carrillo continued to sustain Suárez in the certainty that sustaining Suárez meant sustaining democracy, which made him an indispensable support of the system and meant that, although he didn’t obtain the benefit of power, he obtained national and international respect: after the signing of the Pacts of Moncloa Carrillo received a standing ovation in the Cortes from the UCD deputies and a welcome into the country’s most conservative forums for debate; around the same time he travelled to the United Kingdom and France and became the first Secretary General of a Communist Party allowed to enter the United States, where he was hailed by Time magazine as ‘the apostle of Euro-Communism’. In the short term this was the result of his alliance with Suárez: during those years Carrillo personified a sort of oxymoron, democratic Communism; in the long term the result was his undoing.
Just as happened with Suárez, the beginning of the decline of Carrillo’s political career coincided with the exact moment of its peak. In November 1977, during his triumphant trip to the United States, Carrillo announced without consulting his party that at their next conference the PCE would abandon Leninism. Deep down, it was the logical consequence of the dismantling or demolition or undermining of Communist principles that he’d begun years before – the logical consequence of the attempt to bring into being the oxymoron of democratic Communism he called Euro-Communism – but if months earlier accepting the monarchy and the red-and-yellow flag had been difficult for many, the abrupt abandonment of the Party’s invariable ideological vector all through its history was even more so, because it meant such a radical change of direction that it placed the PCE in practice on the borders of socialism (or social democracy) and also demonstrated that the democratization of the Party on the outside did not assume a corresponding democratization behind closed doors: the Secretary General carried on without restrictions dictating PCE policy and governing it in accord with so-called democratic centralism, a Stalinist method that had nothing democratic about it and was entirely centralist, because it was based on the all-embracing power of the Secretary General, on the extremely hierarchical organizational structure and the uncritical obedience of the rank and file. That was when the Party’s unanimity began to split for all to see, and when Carrillo noticed with astonishment that his authority was becoming a matter for discussion among his comrades: some – the so-called reformists – rejected his individualism and his authoritarian methods and demanded more internal democracy, while others – the so-called pro-Soviets – rejected his ideological revisionism and confrontation with the Soviet Union and demanded a return to Communist orthodoxy; each as much as the other criticized his unshakeable support for Adolfo Suárez’s government and his unshakeable ambition to make common cause with him. But the submissive or disciplined habit of consenting to the dictates of the Secretary General still dominated the spirit of the Communists and, given that the promise of power operated over political parties like a binding agent, these divergences remained more or less buried in the PCE until the next elections, in March 1979: that’s how Carrillo managed in April 1978 to get the 9th Party Conference to adopt Euro-Communism and abandon Leninism. However, a new electoral failure – in the March elections the PCE experienced a slight increase in votes but barely reached a third of the number their direct Socialist competitors received – brought the discrepancies virulently out into the open; in a very short space of time, Carrillo was no longer able to convince his people that this defeat was in reality a victory and that they had to keep backing Suárez and confronting the Socialists who were taking over their political space and their electorate, and during the following years the Communists sank into a succession of increasingly profound internal crises, aggravated by their loss of influence in the politics of the country: with the new distribution of power resulting from the elections, with the end of the politics of accord between all the parties after the approval of the Constitution, after 1979 Suárez didn’t need Carrillo to govern any more and sought the support of the Socialists and not the Communists, turning them into an isolated irrelevant party which barely mattered for the resolution of the big problems, and furthermore whose leader had squandered the statesman’s halo he’d sported just a few months ago. As happened to Suárez at the same time, Carrillo’s loss of prestige in the country’s politics translated into a loss of prestige in his party’s politics. While the protests against the national leadership of the PCE intensified, revolts were being prepared in Catalonia and in the Basque Country, and in Madrid some members of the executive committee stood up to the Secretary General: in July 1980, at the same time as the Party bosses of the UCD rebelled against Adolfo Suárez in a meeting held on a country estate in Manzanares el Real and the movements to remove him from power were getting under way, several high-ranking members of the PCE called Carrillo to the house of Ramón Tamames – the most visible leader of the so-called reformist sector – with the aim of exposing the Party’s problems to him, reproaching him for his errors and calling his leadership into question; it was an unprecedented scene in the history of Spanish Communism, but it was repeated at the beginning of November in the heart of the central committee, when Tamames went so far as to propose that the secretary generalship should be turned into a collective position, almost like a few months earlier, at the Manzanares el Real meeting, the UCD Party bosses had demanded Suárez share his power over the Party and the government with them. Unlike Suárez, Carrillo did not give in, but by then his organization was already irremediably divided between reformers, pro-Soviets and Carrillistas, and in January 1981 that division was consummated in the breaking away of the PSUC, the Communist Party of Catalonia, which constituted just a hint of the ferocious internal fights that would tear apart the PCE for the next year and a half and would go on almost uninterruptedly until the virtual extinction of the Party.
So on the eve of 23 February Santiago Carrillo was not in such a different situation from that of Adolfo Suárez. Their time at the height of their powers had passed: both were now politically hounded, personally diminished, lacking credit with public opinion, furiously attacked within their own parties, embittered by the ingratitude and betrayals of their fellows or what they felt as ingratitude and betrayals of their fellows, two exhausted and disoriented men who’d lost their touch, increasingly hindered by defects that just a few years before had been invisible or hadn’t seemed like defects: their personal notion of power, their talent for political exchange, their inveterate bureaucratic habits of totalitarian structures and incompatibility with the application of the democracy they’d built. Undermining even their demolition of the systems in which they’d grown up and which they’d manipulated as few others could – one Communism and the other Francoism – both had ended up fighting for survival amid the rubble of their former dominion. Neither of the two managed it, and on the eve of 23 February it was already obvious that neither of the two would manage it. At that time their personal relationship was meagre, because they’d turned into two fitters and a fitter is absorbed in the task of fitting. They probably looked at each other out of the corner of their eye every once in a while, remembering not so old times when together they sorted out the country’s destiny with sparkling pyrotechnics of false duels, four-handed sparring, wordless pacts, secret meetings and great accords of state, and the iron alliance they’d forged in those years certainly remained immutable: in the autumn and winter of 1980 Carrillo was one of the few front-line politicians who did not participate in the political manoeuvring against Suárez that laid the ground for 23 February, and never mentioned surgical coups or a touch on the rudder unless denouncing that sinister terminology and that flirting with the Army that constituted ideal ammunition for golpismo; denouncing it outside of his party and within his party: there were also advocates of political shock therapy in the PCE of the time, but when Ramón Tamames twice proclaimed to the press his agreement with a unity government headed by a military officer, Carrillo was quick to use the occasion to defend Suárez, once again fulminating against his main adversary in the Party with a devastating diagnosis: ‘Ramón’s raving.’ On the eve of 23 February Carrillo was still clinging to Suárez the way one shipwrecked man clings to another, he was still thinking that supporting Suárez meant supporting democracy, he was still keeping his eyes open against the risk of a coup d’état and still considering that his formula of a government of national unity with Suárez was the only way to prevent it and to thwart the collapse of what four years earlier they had begun to construct between the two of them. Of course, by that time the idea of governing with Suárez was unworkable; doubly unworkable: because neither he nor Suárez controlled his own party any more and because, although four years before their personal alliance represented a collective alliance between Franco’s two irreconcilable Spains, by the time of 23 February it’s more than likely that he and Suárez no longer represented anybody or hardly anybody, and represented only themselves. But it’s possible that on the evening of the coup, while both remained in their seats in the midst of the gunshots and the rest of the deputies obeyed the golpistas’ orders and lay down on the floor, Carrillo might have felt a sort of vengeful satisfaction, as if that instant corroborated what he’d always believed, and that he and Suárez were the only two real politicians in the country, or at least the only two politicians ready to risk their necks for democracy. I can’t resist imagining that, if it’s true that they both cultivated an epic and aesthetic conception of politics as an individual adventure flecked with dramatic episodes and intrepid decisions, that instant also condensed their twin conception of politics, because neither of the two experienced a more dramatic episode than that burst of gunfire in the Cortes nor ever took a more intrepid decision than the one they both took to remain in their seats while the bullets whizzed around them in the chamber.