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.
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.
Over the next year Suárez began to familiarize himself with his future as a precociously retired politician, father of a nation on the dole, intermediary in occasional business deals, high-priced speaker in Latin America and player of prolonged games of golf. It was a long, peaceful and slightly insipid future, or that’s how he must’ve imagined it, perhaps with a certain unexpected dose of happiness. The first time he left power, after his resignation and the coup d’état, Suárez undoubtedly felt the chill of a heroin addict without heroin; it’s very possible that now he felt nothing of the sort, or that he felt only something very similar to the joyful astonishment of one who throws off an impediment he hadn’t been aware he was carrying. He forgot politics; politics forgot him. He continued to be profoundly religious and I don’t think he would have read Max Weber, so he had no reason to doubt he would be saved and that, although power was an abrasive substance and he had signed a pact with the devil, no one was going to come and collect on it; he continued to be a compulsive optimist, so he must have been sure that now all he had to do was let time go placidly by in the hope that the country would be grateful for his contribution to the victory of democracy. ‘The hero of retreat can only be sure of one thing,’ wrote Hans Magnus Enzensberger of Suárez shortly before he gave up politics, ‘the ingratitude of the fatherland.’ It appears that Enzensberger was mistaken, or at least he was partly mistaken, but Suárez was entirely mistaken, and a little while later a final metamorphosis began to work on him, as if, after having played a young arriviste from a nineteenth-century French novel and a grown-up rogue converted into an aristocratic hero of a neorealist Italian film, a demiurge had reserved for the last plot of his life the tragic role of a pious, old, devastated prince from a Russian novel.
Suárez received the first warning that a placid retirement was not what awaited him just a year and a half after leaving politics, when in the month of November 1992 he learned that his daughter Mariam had breast cancer and the doctors thought she had less than three months to live. The news left him stunned, but it did not paralyse him and without a minute to lose he devoted himself to stopping his daughter’s illness. Two years later, once he thought they’d managed it, they diagnosed an identical cancer in Amparo, his wife. On this occasion the blow was harder, because it came on top of the previous one, and this time he didn’t recover. It may be that, Catholic to the end, weakened by age and misfortune, he ended up being defeated not by that double mortal disease, but by guilt. In the year 2000, when his wife and daughter were still alive, Suárez wrote a prologue for a book his daughter wrote about her illness. ‘Why them? Why us?’ he lamented. ‘What have they done? What have we done?’ Suárez understands that such questions are absurd, ‘the logical attribute of an instinctive egomania’, but in spite of that it proves he posed them many times and that, although he hadn’t read Max Weber, remorse mortified him many times with the illusory reproach that the devil had come to collect his part of the bargain and that the burnt wasteland that surrounded him was the result of the instinctive egomania that had allowed him to get to be who he’d always wanted to be. And it was just then that it happened. It was just then, at perhaps the darkest moment of his life, that the inevitable arrived, the longed-for moment of public recognition, the opportunity for all to show their gratitude for the sacrifice of his honour and his conscience for the country, the humiliating national din of compassion, he was the great man cut down by misfortune who no longer bothered anyone, was no longer able to overshadow anyone, who was never going to return to politics and could be used by this side and that and converted into the perfect paladin of concord, into the unbeaten ace of reconciliation, into the immaculate enabler of democratic change, into a living statue suitable for hiding behind and cleansing consciences and securing shaky institutions and shamelessly exhibiting the satisfaction of the country with its immediate past and, in Wagnerian scenes of gratitude for the fallen leader, homages, awards, honorific distinctions began to rain down on him, he recovered the King’s friendship, the confidence of the Prime Ministers who followed him, popular favour, he achieved everything he’d wanted and anticipated although it was all a little false and forced and hurried and most of all late, because by then he was going or had gone and could barely contemplate his final collapse without understanding it too well and begging everyone who crossed his path to pray for his wife and for his daughter, as if his soul had got definitively lost in a labyrinth of self-pitying contrition and tormented meditations on the guilty fruits of egomania and he had become definitively transformed into the old repentant sinner prince of a novel by Dostoevsky.
In May 2001 his wife died; three years later his daughter died. By then his mind had abdicated and he was in another place, far from himself. The illness had begun to appear long before, taking him back and forth from memory to forgetfulness, but towards 2003 his deterioration could no longer be hidden. His last political speech dates from that time, although it wasn’t exactly a political speech; a fragment was shown on television. The party of the right had offered his son Adolfo the candidacy for premier of the autonomous community of Castilla-La Mancha; because he was not unaware that the intention of the offer was to cash in on the prestige of his surname, Suárez advised his son not to accept, but the yearning to emulate his father was stronger than his lack of vocation and the son stood as candidate and the father felt obliged to defend him. On 3 May the two of them held a rally in Albacete. Standing in front of the crowd facing a lectern, Suárez is wearing a dark suit, white shirt and a polka-dot tie; he is seventy years old and, though his body still has vestiges of his poise on the tennis court and dance floor, he looks it, his hair flecked with white, receding sharply, his skin mottled with age spots. He doesn’t talk of politics; he talks of his son, he mentions the fact that he studied at Harvard and then he stops dead. ‘My God,’ he says, barely smiling and shuffling the papers he’s prepared. ‘I think I’ve got myself in a terrible mess.’ The audience applauds, encourages him to go on, and he looks up from his papers, bites his lower lip with a faded flirtatiousness and smiles for a long time; for those who’ve known him for years, it’s an unmistakable smile: it’s the same smile of the beau sure of his charms with which in other times he could convince a Falangist, an Opus Dei technocrat or a Guerrillero de Cristo Rey that deep down he was a paramilitary, a Falangist or an admirer of Opus; it’s the same smile with which he could say: I’m no Communist (or Socialist), no, but I am one of you, because my family was always Republican and deep down I’ve always been one; it’s the same smile with which he said: I have power and you have legitimacy: we have to understand each other. It’s the same smile, perhaps a little less natural or more vague, but deep down it’s the same. He looks back at the papers, he says again that his son studied at Harvard, he stops dead again. ‘I don’t know if I’m repeating myself,’ he says. An urgent round of applause breaks out. ‘I’m in a terrible mess with these papers,’ he repeats. The music starts up, people stand to drown out his muttering with applause, he forgets about the papers and tries to improvise a closing, but amid all the uproar all that can be heard of what he says is the following phrase: ‘My son will not let you down.’
They were the last words he pronounced in public. There it all ended. Then, for some years, he disappeared, shut up in his house in La Florida, and it was as if he had died. In fact, everyone began to speak of him as if he were dead. I myself have written this book as if he were dead. One day, however, he appeared again: it was 18 July 2008. That morning all the Spanish newspapers had his latest photograph on the front cover. His son Adolfo had taken it the day before, and in it Suárez appears with the King in the garden of his house in La Florida. The two men have their backs to the camera, walking beneath the sun on a recently mown lawn towards a leafy tree. The King is wearing a grey suit and his right hand is resting on Suárez’s right shoulder, with a friendly or protective air; Suárez is wearing a light-blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, beige trousers and tan shoes. The photograph captures a moment of a visit by the King to give Suárez the chain of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the highest honour granted by the Spanish Royal Family; according to the articles, the King has also granted it to other significant figures in Spain’s recent past – among them Grand Duke Juan I of Luxembourg, Beatriz I of the Netherlands or Margarita II of Denmark – although he’s only granted it a little more than a year ago to the nonentity who helped him more than anyone to conserve the Crown, and until that day he hadn’t had time to bring it to him. The gratitude of the nation.