Of course the main opposition, the PSOE, the Spanish Socialist Party, is plotting against Suárez (or Suárez feels they’re plotting against him). But, unlike Fraga and his party, the businessmen and bankers and even the journalists, the leaders of the PSOE have absolutely no experience of power and are barely beginning to penetrate the corridors of the great sewer of Madrid, so they operate with a naive rookie clumsiness that makes them easy to manipulate by those planning the coup.
The Socialists have been the surprise of the new democracy: run since 1974 by an impetuous group of young men with a clean democratic pedigree (albeit little or no relevance in the struggle against Franco), the PSOE is from then on a party clustered around the leadership of Felipe González, and in 1977, after the first democratic elections, becomes the second largest party in the country and the largest on the left, displacing Santiago Carrillo’s Communist Party, which throughout the Franco period has been in practice the only party of clandestine opposition. The electoral triumph plunges the Socialists into a perplexed euphoria, and for the next two years they develop, as do Fraga’s right and Carrillo’s Communists, a politics of accords with Suárez that culminates in the passing of the Constitution, but at the beginning of 1979, when the first constitutional elections are about to be held, they understand their time has come: like so many people on the right and the left, they think that, once the edifice of Francoism has been demolished and the edifice of democracy erected with the Constitution, Suárez has finished the task the King assigned him; they don’t despise Suárez (or not yet, or not in public, or not entirely) for being an upstart errand boy designated in haste as foreman and eventually self-styled architect, although they are absolutely sure that only they can successfully administer democracy, establish it in the country and integrate the country into Europe; they think the country thinks like them and they also think, as jittery as hungry children in front of a cake-shop window, that if they don’t win these elections they’ll never win; they think they’re going to win. But they don’t win, and that disappointment is mainly responsible for four decisions they make in the following months: the first consists of attributing their unexpected defeat to Suárez’s final television appearance of the campaign, in which the Prime Minister managed to frighten an electorate wary of the Marxist radicalism of a PSOE that according to its statutes was still a Marxist party but according to its deeds and words was already a social democratic party; the second is to interpret Suárez’s televised intervention as a dirty trick, and to assume that you can’t play fair with someone who plays dirty; the third consists of accepting that they would only get into government if they managed to destroy Suárez politically and personally, demolishing the reputation of the leader who had beaten them in two consecutive elections; the fourth is the corollary of the previous three: it consists of going all out for Suárez’s head.
From the autumn of 1979 – once the term Marxism was eliminated from the PSOE statutes and Felipe González’s power in the leadership of the Party reinforced – the offensive, increasingly endorsed by Suárez’s inability to curb the country’s deterioration, is merciless: the Socialists paint a daily apocalyptic picture of the Prime Minister’s administration, they dig up and throw in his face his past as a Falangist errand boy and Movimiento social climber, accuse him of ruining the democratic project, of being ready to sell Spain in order to remain in Moncloa, call him illiterate, a card sharp, a potential golpista. Meanwhile, they opt for dramatic effect, and in the middle of May 1980 propose a vote of no confidence against Suárez in the Cortes. The manoeuvre, destined in theory to make Felipe González Prime Minister, is a mathematical failure because the Socialist leader does not obtain enough votes to remove Suárez from his post, but most of all it is a propagandistic success: during the debate the television cameras show a young, persuasive and prime ministerial González facing an aged and defeated Suárez unable even to defend himself from his adversary’s attacks. This triumph, however, marks a limit: with the no-confidence motion the Socialists have used up the parliamentary mechanisms for taking the premiership; and this is when, goaded by desperation and fear and immaturity and greed for power, they begin to explore the limits of the recently debuted democracy, forcing its rules to the utmost without yet having mastered them; and this is when they turn into useful tools for the golpistas.
Since before the summer those recent arrivals in the salons, tertulias and restaurants of the political village of Madrid have talked and heard talk of golpes de estado, coups d’état, of governments of national unity, caretaker governments, governments of salvation, of de Gaulle-style operations; their attitude to this is ambiguous: on the one hand the rumours worry them; on the other hand they don’t want to be left to one side when it comes to replacing Suárez, because they are impatient to prove that, as well as knowing how to operate in opposition, they know how to operate in government, and they also begin to consider the idea of forming a coalition or caretaker or unity government chaired by a military officer, a proposal for which in the last week of August they seek support in discussions with Jordi Pujol, premier of the Catalan autonomous government. Undoubtedly with this idea in mind, in the autumn the Socialists make enquiries into the Army’s mood and about the murmurs of a military coup, and in mid-October, after an internal meeting during which Felipe González wonders whether all the warning lights of the democracy were not already flashing and in which they discuss the eventuality of the Party entering a coalition government, several PSOE leaders meet with General Sabino Fernández Campo, secretary to the King, and with General Alfonso Armada, his predecessor in the post, whose name had been on everyone’s lips for months as a possible leader of a government of unity. Felipe González is involved in the interview with Fernández Campo; not in the interview with Alfonso Armada: it is conducted by Enrique Múgica, the Party’s number three and until recently leader of the Congressional Defence Committee. In light of 23 February the conversation between Múgica and Armada takes on important significance, and its protagonists have told of it in public more than once. The interview, which lasts for almost four hours, is held on 22 October during a lunch given at the home of the Mayor of Lérida, in the province of which the general has been military governor since the beginning of the year, and is attended, as well as by the host, by Joan Raventós, leader of the Catalan Socialists. Múgica and Armada seem to get along personally; politically as well, at least on the crucial point: both agree that the situation of the country is catastrophic, which according to Armada is of great worry to the King and is putting the Crown in danger; both agree that the only one responsible for the catastrophe is Suárez and that Suárez leaving power is the only possible solution to the mess, although according to Armada the solution would not be complete unless an interim or unity government was immediately formed with the participation of the principal political parties and led by an independent, if possible from the military. Múgica does not say no to this last suggestion; then Raventós interjects and asks Armada if he would be willing to be the military officer who heads the government; Armada does not say no to this suggestion either. The lunch ends without promises or commitments, but Múgica writes up a report on the interview for the Party’s executive committee, in the weeks that follow various members of that organization sound out leaders of minority parties about the possibility of forming a coalition government led by a soldier and over the course of the autumn and winter several different rumours spread around Madrid – the PSOE plans a new no-confidence motion supported by a sector of Suárez’s party, the PSOE plans to enter a caretaker or interim government with Fraga’s party and a sector of Suárez’s party – united by the common denominator of a general with whom the Socialists intend to remove Suárez from Moncloa.
That was all. Or that’s all we know, because at that time the leaders of the PSOE often discussed the role the Army could play in situations of emergency such as the one they believed the country was going through, which was a way of signalling the landing strip for military intervention. In any case, the long lunchtime chat between Enrique Múgica and General Armada in Lérida and the movements and rumours to which it gave rise constituted backing for Armada’s golpista inclinations and a good alibi enabling the King’s former secretary to insinuate or declare here and there in the months before the coup that the Socialists would readily participate in a unitarian government led by him or were even encouraging him to form one, and on the night of 23 February, again waving the banner of the PSOE’s acquiescence, to try to impose that government by force. All this does not of course mean that during the autumn and winter of 1980 the Socialists were plotting in favour of a military coup against democracy; it only means that a strong dose of irresponsible bewilderment induced by an itching for power led them to press to a frightening degree the siege of the legitimate Prime Minister of the country and that, believing they were manoeuvring against Adolfo Suárez, they ended up manoeuvring unknowingly in favour of the enemies of democracy.