Chapter 5: Building a new world with the bricks of the old: the democratic pact 1977–9

UCD divisions

"The pre-electoral confusion of over 300 political parties had been reduced on 15 June to a four-party system and the voters had opted overwhelmingly for moderation. In opinion polls, four out of every five Spaniards described themselves as belonging to the area between right and left of centre. "

"It was in the nature of things that the UCD would be reluctant to carry the banner of structural reform. A fragmented coalition whose components represented elements of the financial and industrial élite and the more progressive segments of the Francoist bureaucracy was hardly fitted to undertake major fiscal and agrarian reform. Indeed, over the next three years, the upper ranks of UCD were to demonstrate a much deeper commitment to the scramble for highly paid official posts. The component groups of the
UCD electoral coalition had planned to go their separate ways after the elections and agreed to unification not out of ideological affinity but only to guarantee their proximity to the fount of power."

"Alvarez de Miranda, who wanted to see UCD develop into a Christian Democrat party within the European CD Union, was always to be a thorn in the side of Suárez. He had been reluctant to see the dissolution of the component parties into UCD without a full debate to clarify its ideological position...The Christian Democrats were to be a constant source of preoccupation for the President and would play a key role in his eventual downfall. In general, the need to placate all these various groups was always to be a major political handicap for Suárez when it came to composing a cabinet. The most conservative of the Christian Democrats, Alfonso Osorio, stayed out of the operation
altogether. Instead, he linked up with José María de Areilza and Manuel Fraga’s Alianza Popular to make the so-called Aravaca Pact. Out of these talks, the unequivocally rightist Coalición Democrática emerged. "

"The struggle to keep the disparate UCD together; the handicap of not having an overall parliamentary majority; the problems of constructing a widely acceptable constitutional framework; the incessant need to resolve disputes over both the new Constitution and the rights of autonomous nationalities; and above all the daily erosion of energy and vision by the anti-democratic violence of right and left; all these things conspired to diminish Suárez’s ability to deliver a brave new world. Prior deals both within UCD and with other parties were always required before major Cortes votes. Accordingly, natural inclination and the essence of the problems facing him accelerated the President’s withdrawal into smoke-filled rooms. His secretive style of backstairs dealing and a generalized sense of helplessness in the face of ETA and the army were, by 1980, to convert the optimism of 1977 into disenchantment with Suárez and UCD. In the course of four years, a spiral of terrorism and military interventionism carried apprehension and fear into daily life.

Yet the creation of a democratic regime and the probability of wide concessions of regional autonomy had seemed to constitute adequate grounds for expecting that ETA violence might come to an end. That this was not to be the case was in large measure the consequence of Suárez’s earlier slowness in conceding political amnesty. "

Basque issues

"The fact that Suárez had eventually capitulated before the June elections, and granted a total amnesty on 20 May, apparently in response to terrorist actions, was seen as merely a vindication of armed action by some sections of the abertzale left. The only left Basque nationalist group to respond to Suárez’s concession had been Euskadiko Eskerra. Led by ex-Etarras and associated with ETA-PM, Euskadiko Eskerra had been formed from the fusion of EIA with the Movimiento Comunista before the elections. It had been rewarded in the elections with a parliamentary deputy, Francisco Letamendía, and a senator, Juan María Bandrés Molet, both for the province of Guipúzcoa. The remainder of the groups loosely united in the Koordinadora Abertzale Sozialista remained unremittingly hostile to Madrid. Indeed, their activities were soon to suggest that, far from being prepared to come to terms with the new democratic regime, they were committed to a strategy which was likely to risk its destruction. 4

The two wings of ETA reacted differently to the election results of 15 June 1977. ETA-PM’s response was to conclude that Euskadiko Eskerra’s success justified the strategy of combining legal and illegal methods. The belief that the changing political situation would require armed struggle to be relegated to an ever more secondary role had originated with ‘Pertur’ and his seminal report, the Ponencia Otsagabía. The adoption of his line was to lead eventually to Euskadiko Eskerra’s fusion with the Eurocommunist wing of the Basque Communist Party and incorporation into conventional parliamentary activity. In the short term, the abandonment of violence was to cause internal division, schisms and a nostalgic longing for armed action. The older heads of ETA-PM, ex- prisoners like Mario Onaindía, had moved away from violent activism and concentrated their energies in EIA and Euskadiko Eskerra. ETA-PM itself, as a clandestine military organization, remained in the hands of young men and women always prepared to return to terrorism. Accordingly, although it continued to respect the ceasefire negotiated in May, ETA-PM was still part of the violent abertzale opposition to the democratic regime.

Nevertheless, ETA-PM was considered by ETA-Militar to be a traitor to the cause of an independent Euskadi. This view was shared by an important dissident fragment within ETA-PM. Led by the cold-blooded fanatic Miguel Angel Apalátegui, ‘Apala’, who had opposed the line of ‘Pertur’ and was suspected of having murdered him, the opponents of negotiation with the government had formed the so-called Comandos Bereziak. In an effort to break the truce of 20 May 1977, they had been responsible for the kidnapping of the Basque industrialist Javier de Ibarra y Berge on the same day. After the elections, and throughout the summer of 1977, the Comandos Bereziak negotiated their merger with ETA-M. Both groups were united in accepting Apalátegui’s sectarian view that the elections were a stunt ‘to legitimize fascism’. ETA’s existence only made sense as opposition against a dictatorship. Accordingly, the leadership of the Milis simply closed their eyes to the fact that democracy had been established in Spain. 5 Popular electoral abstention in the Basque Country of about 22 per cent was myopically assumed to be a Building a new world with the bricks of the old: the democratic pact 1977-9 93 gesture of abertzale support for ETA-Militar. The fact that published levels of abstention were not higher was taken as further evidence that the election results were a fraud.

In the xenophobic view of the newly augmented ETA-Militar, therefore, nothing had changed since the dictatorship. The centralist forces which had always oppressed Euskadi continued to do so and their police were as brutal as ever. The only difference, in the eyes of the left abertzales, was that Spanish tyranny was now masked by the trappings of a fraudulent democracy"

"Young policemen from poorer parts of Spain were posted to the Basque Country. Even if they were apolitical on arrival, the ostracism of their wives and children by the local population and the general atmosphere of bitter hostility soon turned them into determined enemies of the Basque cause. The Basque problem required the greatest delicacy and courage from the central government. Both Suárez and Martín Villa were to be found wanting, perhaps understandably, given the weight of opinion within the armed forces and the police. None the less, they consistently resisted pressure for the army to be sent into Euskadi. The right wanted to see no concessions made to Basque aspirations and stood to gain political capital from the existence of ETA terrorism. It came as no surprise, when the summer 1977 truce in Euskadi was finally broken, that the detonator was ultra- rightist terrorism."

"On 5 October the offices in Pamplona of the abertzale weekly, Punto y Hora, were bombed by a fascist organization calling itself the Alianza Apostólica Anticomunista. It was the excuse that the restless adolescents of ETA-Militar needed to unleash a terrorist offensive against the government...Out of such conflict, the abertzale extremists hoped to forge an independent revolutionary state. Accordingly, the last thing that the ETA-Militar leadership wanted was compromise by Madrid. Thus, in order to provoke an intensification of repression and thereby build popular support, attacks were made on senior military officers. A policy which was to bear fruit in the proliferation of army interventionism, or golpismo, began with the assassination of the Pamplona Police Chief, Major Joaquín Imaz Martínez, in late November. 10 Although it was never to provoke the desired military invasion of Euskadi, ETA-M’s strategy did ensure that police methods continued to be dominated by indiscriminate brutality. Protest demonstrations, punctuated by the chant ‘Gora ETA! ETA herria zurekin!’, (‘Long live ETA! ETA the people is with you!’), were evidence of the popular support for the activists generated by police repression."

"That smouldering hatred engendered under Franco remained intense was partly the consequence of mistakes made by the government in 1976 and 1977 over the amnesty issue. However, it owed more to the behaviour of the unreformed forces of order. All over Spain, people were prepared to believe that, despite the Francoist background of their new UCD rulers, real change was underway. In contrast, substantial numbers of Basques believed that fascist oppression continued to exist under another name."

Army conspiracy

"Ever since the legalization of the PCE, the propensity to anti-democratic conspiracy in the higher echelons of the armed forces had been intensifying...In fact, the actively negative role played by military intelligence, in preventing information about conspiracies reaching the government and in terms of providing information for the preparations for coup attempts, was a crucial element of golpismo after 1977. Originally created to eradicate any signs of liberalism in the armed forces, the intelligence services were hard-line Francoist in their composition, objectives and methods. After the death of Franco, they were subjected only to the merest cosmetic reorganization. In consequence, the sworn enemies of the democratic regime were provided with an invaluable instrument with which to co-ordinate military plotting and to provide an alternative chain of command during a coup. At the same time as the bunker press was inciting officers to intervention, the intelligence services were failing to report on the success of this propaganda within the ranks. Indeed, as far as the government was concerned, the problem with the intelligence services seemed to be inefficiency rather than disloyalty. Suárez once complained that two intelligence service captains had their jobs described on their visiting cards. 13"

"Under the first democratic government of Suárez, a vain attempt was made to break the power of the SIPG. It was subsumed on 2 November 1977, together with the independent services run by each branch of the forces, into the Centro Superior de la Información de la Defensa (CESID). Since the CESID, on its creation, inherited the personnel of its various predecessors, the dominance of Carrero’s trusted servants, the so-called ‘hombres de Carrero’, was unaffected. They were thus able to build up a parallel power structure virtually independent of the military hierarchy which was more or less loyal to the King and therefore to Gutiérrez Mellado. The Suárez government turned a blind eye to this and regularly issued statements praising the loyalty of its intelligence services despite evidence that the CESID was devoting its energies to spying on ministers and other politicians while failing to investigate military subversion.14"

"Optimism in political circles that loyalty to the King would keep the military in check was brusquely disabused in mid-September. A meeting of senior generals was held at the home of General Fernando de Santiago y Díaz de Mendívil in Játiva in the province of Valencia. Bringing together three ex-Ministers for the army, Antonio Barroso Sánchez Guerra, Francisco Coloma Gallegos and Félix Alvarez Arenas, the ex-Minister for the Navy, Admiral Pita da Veiga, and the ultra Generals Carlos Iniesta Cano, Angel Campano López and Jaime Milans del Bosch, it was presided over by General Santiago. Between 13 and 16 September, they discussed the military situation and drew up a memorandum calling upon the King to appoint a government of national salvation to be presided over by Santiago. In the event of the King refusing, he was to be asked to sack Suárez and suspend parliament for two years. Despite widespread rumours about the meeting, Ministry of Defence spokesmen denied unofficially that any such memorandum had been presented. Nevertheless, behind these requests for what amounted to a bloodless coup d’état, there was the clear threat of outright military intervention. 1"

"Thus, General Gutiérrez Mellado persisted with a policy of trying to bring the armed forces under control by means of strategic postings and promotions."

Catalonia

"The failure of the cabinet to eliminate military subversion or Basque terrorism did not mean that it was entirely ineffectual or inactive. In the case of Catalonia, the special relationship established between Suárez and the seventy-seven-year-old exiled President of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Josep Tarradellas, enabled the Prime Minister to carry off a spectacular political coup

...At the time, Tarradellas seemed to be merely an eccentric anachronism. Yet, as Ortínez made clear to Osorio, the majority of Catalans accepted him as the legitimate embodiment of Catalanism

...Suárez’s reluctance lost him valuable time. The swift introduction of devolutionary legislation similar to the Catalan Autonomy Statute of 1932 could have given the UCD much greater control over the autonomy process. It would certainly have paved the way to a similar procedure in the Basque autonomy process, kept control of the pace of
regional devolution in the hands of government and perhaps limited the subsequent Babel of demands for autonomy from regions without any historic tradition of local
nationalism. However, such a determined course of action would inevitably have provoked immense hostility on the right given that the Civil War had been fought in part to destroy such legislation. Accordingly, the necessary will and vision was lacking and Suárez, true to his Movimiento origins, was never particularly sensitive where the nationalities were concerned. What finally galvanized him into action was the outcome of the 15 June elections in Catalonia. The UCD had been swamped by the so-called partidos sucursalistas, the PSC and PSUC, the Catalan branches of nationwide parties, the Socialists and the Communists. With his unparalleled instinct for political advantage, Suárez began to realize that he could use the powerful emotional symbol of the Generalitat to recapture the lost initiative.

On 27 June 1977, Tarradellas went to Madrid and engaged in arduous negotiations with the Prime Minister. Effectively, in return for the re-establishment of the Generalitat, through an adaptation of the 1932 Statute, Tarradellas would pledge Catalan loyalty to the monarchy, acceptance of the unity of Spain and respect for the armed forces. Suárez commented later that, during the meeting, Tarradellas’s central preoccupation had been to ensure that he would be accorded full military honours. This suggested not just the stubborn pride of ‘El Honorable’ but also his shrewd perception that it was essential for the army to be seen to acquiesce in the process of devolution. None the less, the meeting Building a new world with the bricks of the old: the democratic pact 1977-9 99 was a major theatrical gesture which somewhat undermined the electoral victory of the Catalan left-wing parties as well as re-affirming Suárez’s penchant for government by private negotiation. The re-establishment of the Generalitat was also an immense popular success although a price had to be paid in terms of resentment within the army. The Captain-General of Catalonia, Francisco Coloma Gallegos, protested at the reception of Tarradellas by Juan Carlos. Both the King and General Gutiérrez Mellado had to work hard to placate him and thus ensure that Tarradellas would receive the desired military honours when he returned in triumph to Barcelona on 23 October. "

Basque autonomy

"Suárez’s deal with Tarradellas was announced to the cabinet on 29 September. Progress with the Basques was to be altogether slower in large part because of the amnesty question. By the beginning of October 1977, there was an intensification of united opposition pressure for a wide-ranging amnesty to include not just Etarras but also army officers who had fought for the Republic during the Civil War and even terrorists of the ultra-right responsible for the Atocha massacre. Amnesty was a crucial item on the agenda when Suárez arranged to meet representatives of all the political parties. In the course of lengthy sessions held at the Palacio de la Moncloa over the weekend of 8–9 October...the restoration of the Generalitat before it, was a potent symbol of reconciliation and co- existence. 20"

"The most conflictive issue as far as Basque autonomy was concerned hinged on the position of Navarre. In the eyes of the abertzales and some of the northern Navarrese, the province was part of Euskadi. For the army, the UCD and the Spanish right in general and the Navarrese right in particular, it was a bulwark of Spanish unity. Moreover, neither the PSOE nor the PCE were in favour of including Navarre within the Basque Country. After bitter anti-Basque demonstrations organized by the ultra-right in Navarre throughout December, the jurisdiction of the Consejo General Vasco was limited to the three indisputably Basque provinces of Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa and Alava. 22 "

"UCD’s policy on autonomy was destined to infuriate the military and ETA in equal degrees. In the jaundiced view of the abertzales, the UCD was master-minding an elaborate operation to render Basque self-government innocuous by first swamping it in a sea of autonomies and then conditioning it to the lowest common denominator. For most army officers, UCD’s autonomy concessions were a wild orgy at which the debauched victim was Spanish unity. In fact, the government was dealing with a complex situation in which the PSOE and the PCE were committed to some form of federal state while the extreme right remained as obsessively tied as ever to rigid centralism. At the same time, in the political ferment of 1977, autonomy demands were emerging from the most unlikely parts of Spain. It was an inevitable reaction both to the corruption and
inefficiency of local government under Franco and to the economic imbalances bequeathed by his regime. The compromise solution encharged to Manuel Clavero Arévalo had to take the steam out of local aspirations without enraging the sensibilities of the military. Throughout the period from October 1977 to October 1978, Clavero tried to create a two-tier system. The three historic nationalities, Catalonia, Euskadi and Galicia, were permitted to elaborate an autonomy statute which had then to be submitted to local referendum. Thirteen other regions, some small like Cantabria, others large like Andalusia, were subjected to much vaguer arrangements. 23 It was a solution which, in the short term at least, satisfied no one. Moreover, by seeming to be hastening Spain quietly towards a federal structure, it was to be at the heart of growing military disaffection with the democratic regime."

The Moncloa Pact

"The antipathy of the military and the abertzales excepted, however, the autumn and winter of 1977 were marked by a remarkable spirit of co-operation and sacrifice among the main political parties. This reached its apogee in the agreements signed by thirty-one representatives of virtually all parties and known as the Pacto de la Moncloa. Arising from the meeting held on 8–9 October and another on 13 October, the Pact aimed to establish a common response to the problems of terrorism, inflation, unemployment and Building a new world with the bricks of the old: the democratic pact 1977-9 101 the growing trade deficit. The meetings and the Pact were another triumph for Suárez’s
style of private wheeling and dealing. Just as he had exploited Tarradellas to control the Catalan situation, now he exploited Santiago Carrillo equally skilfully. The Communist leader had spent the summer of 1977 frenetically trying to make good the PCE’s disappointing showing in the elections by pushing for a government of ‘democratic concentration’. Carrillo argued that the strength of anti-democratic forces in Spain called for an Italian-style ‘historic compromise among the parliamentary parties to help build a strong framework for democracy. Suárez was not prepared to share power but he was happy to take advantage of Communist influence in the workers’ movement. Secret negotiations with Carrillo played on the PCE leader’s anxiety to be near the levers of power and secured his backing for an austerity package. Armed with the virtual agreement of the Workers’ Commissions, Suárez was able to exert considerable pressure on the PSOE to accept the package.

The Moncloa Pact was in many respects the culmination of the policies of moderation and self-sacrifice pursued by both the Socialists and Communists throughout the transition period. The left accepted wage ceilings of 20–22 per cent, at a time when inflation was 29 per cent, together with a series of monetarist measures to restrict credit and public spending. In return, the government made promises of major structural reform, especially in agriculture and the tax system, undertook to reorganize the police and pledged the return of the patrimonio sindical—the buildings, newspapers and funds of the trade unions confiscated by the Francoists after the Civil War. In fact, the government fulfilled few of its promises and, in consequence, the Spanish working class bore the brunt of the economic crisis. Over the next three years, inflation dropped to 15 per cent, although remaining nearly twice the OECD average, and unemployment soared from 7 per cent to nearly 13 per cent. UCD’s monetarist policies led to a flood of bankruptcies and plant closures. 25 This was to be exploited by ultra-rightist propaganda. Conveniently forgetting the extent to which the world context was as responsible for the economic down-turn in the 1970s as it had been for the boom years of the 1960s, the press network of the extreme right began to make simplistic and unjustified comparisons with the prosperity attributed to Franco. 26

The Moncloa Pact was claimed as a colossal victory by Carrillo at the PCE’s great carnival, the Fiesta de Mundo Obrero. 27 In fact, as Suárez knew, the PCE and even the PSOE would be unable to oblige the government to fulfil its side of the bargain. The Pact was a necessary evil, virtually the only way, short of revolutionary measures, of confronting the inextricably linked problems of the burden of Francoist economic imbalance and the unfavourable international situation. An austerity programme was hardly likely to generate popular enthusiasm. The subsequent increase in unemployment, together with the failure of the government to keep its promises, provoked instead considerable popular disappointment, which was eventually picked up by the press and elevated into the desencanto of 1980. Given the exaggerated expectations that democracy would be a panacea for all of Spain’s ills, this was perhaps inevitable. After the political excitement of the previous year, the need to deal with painful problems like terrorism and economic stagnation was bound to be anticlimactic. Similarly, the elaboration of complex juridical texts such as the Constitution, autonomy legislation and a new penal code could
ill compare with the intoxication and novelty of the election campaign. Throughout the next two years, the government was to appear to be adrift in contrast to the purposeful dynamism which had characterized Suárez’s first year in power. Yet, while both the extreme right and ETA were to exploit the image of a government bogged down in intractable problems, considerable achievements were being forged behind closed doors"

The Constitution

"Such had been the case with the social contract hammered out at the Moncloa and it was even more so with the creation of the Constitution. A political truce between the parties, the so-called Pacto constitucional, considerably facilitated this momentous task. An all-party drafting committee, the Ponencia, consisting of seven parliamentary deputies, was elected by the Constitutional Committee of the Cortes at the beginning of August 1977. 28 The seven carried out their labours in a spirit of compromise and co- operation and by mid-November they had produced a draft text. At the beginning of 1978, a somewhat more refined draft was placed before the thirty-six members of the parliamentary Constitutional Committee. Despite inevitable friction over such issues as abortion, autonomies, private education and the death penalty, a steady pace of progress was maintained under the witty and flexible chairmanship of Emilio Attard. Attard became the darling of the press because of his droll interventions and the members of the Committee were known as ‘los locos de Attard’ (a pun on locos de atar, whose equivalent would be something like ‘mad as Attards’). 29

A crisis was reached in May 1978 when it became known that one of the main reasons for the smooth functioning of the Committee was that many clauses were being agreed beforehand between the UCD and the PSOE behind the backs of the chairman and the other Committee members. Secret deals on various clauses of the draft were being concluded by Fernando Abril Martorell of the UCD and Alfonso Guerra of the PSOE in late-night sessions in private apartments and occasionally in Madrid restaurants. This provoked the withdrawal from the Committee of both Alianza Popular and the Partido Nacionalista Vasco. The Committee, with Alianza Popular restored to its ranks, finished its deliberations on 20 June. The text was then put before the full Chamber of Deputies and the Senate and was ratified on 31 October 1978. Apart from the failure to satisfy the Basques, it was a text whose moderation and guarantee of basic liberties was broadly acceptable to all but the extremes of left and right. 30

In general terms, the positive achievements of the Constitution were appreciated by the population at large, despite its concern with problems of unemployment and terrorism. Lacking the sensational aspects of assassinations or street crime, the Constitution inevitably received less media coverage. None the less, university experts in constitutional law were in constant demand to give lectures explaining the text and its implications in the small towns and villages of Spain. In Euskadi, however, the continuing tension between the forces of order and large sectors of the population made the nascent Constitution seem an empty irrelevance. Random brutality by the police and Civil Guard, together with the Francoist past of the Minister of the Interior, Rodolfo Martín Villa, fuelled popular support for ETA. The widespread belief in the Basque Country that the relentless harshness of the police had the support of the Minister gave credibility to the ETA contention that the fight against Madrid must go on. On 11 January Building a new world with the bricks of the old: the democratic pact 1977-9 103 1978, a policeman and two Etarras were killed in a shoot-out in Pamplona. Astonishingly, it was reported that, when asked for comment by journalists, Martín Villa unwisely remarked ‘2–1 to us’. 31 Wall slogans and banners focused increasingly on Martín Villa as the heir to Francoist oppression. His repeated declarations to the effect that the problems of Euskadi were police matters rather than political ones left many Basques convinced that nothing could be expected from UCD. This was a view shared by influential figures within the army."

Further issues for Suarez

"Indeed, after his succession of triumphs during the autumn of 1977, the tide turnedagainst Suárez in the course of 1978. In addition to the issue of political terrorism, the ultra press was able to exploit a rise in the crime rate to generate middle-class panic about a collapse of law and order. On 25 January 1978, the ex-mayor of Barcelona and one- time Movimiento hard-liner, Joaquín Viola Sauret, and his wife were horribly murdered with explosives by a gang of extortionists. Coming after a wave of kidnappings and muggings, the appalling deaths of the Violas unleashed a storm of protest. The increase of street crime was a reflection of spiralling unemployment. The ultra-right preferred the explanation that delinquency was being perpetrated by leftists released from prison by amnesty measures. On the left, the view gained currency that the police were trying to undermine democracy be simply letting crime get out of hand. There was certainly a remarkable contrast between the brutal efficacy of the police under Franco and its apparent helplessness in the democratic regime. As El Alcázar explained the crime wave, ‘What is happening in Spain? The answer is simple and hardly complex: Francisco Franco died.’32 In fact, the Spanish crime rate was not unusual by European standards. None the less, the law and order issue contributed significantly to the erosion of the public credibility of the Suárez government.

It was, however, ETA terrorism and the military reactions provoked by it which were eventually to destroy Suárez. Nevertheless, there were other reasons for the immediate deterioration of his image. Although the wage restraint agreed in the Pacto de la Moncloa had helped to reduce inflation by almost half, businesses continued to close at an alarming rate and unemployment to rise. The Minister for the Economy, Enrique Fuentes Quintana, aimed to fulfil some of the government promises of structural reform made in the Pact. However, his plans for cut-backs in steel production and for the nationalization of electricity production offended the conservative backers of UCD. Aware of his growing isolation, Fuentes Quintana resigned on 22 February. The fall of Fuentes represented a blow to the social democratic pretensions of some sectors of UCD and a boost to the Christian Democrat wing and their supporters in the banking world. The consequent cabinet reshuffle saw a significant turn to the right. "

"The impression that Suárez was simply not governing was reflected in a dramatic fall in his opinion poll ratings.35

Nowhere was his popularity as low as among the senior ranks of the army. The hope of many politicians that the passage of time would reconcile the armed forces to the democratic regime was simply not being fulfilled. Indeed, throughout 1978, Suárez and Gutiérrez Mellado seemed to be skating on ever thinner ice. The precariousness of the situation was underlined on 17 May by the resignation of the Chief of the General Staff, General José Vega Rodríguez, hitherto regarded as a reliable moderate."

"The resignation of Vega Rodríguez was a bitter blow for Gutiérrez Mellado at the same time as it provided a focus for discontent within the army. As Vega’s successor, the apparently apolitical General Tomás Liniers Pidal was appointed Chief of the General Staff. The nature of his apoliticism was swiftly revealed when, in a speech delivered in Buenos Aires on 15 June 1978, Liniers praised the Argentine military’s ‘legitimate’ use of violence in their ‘dirty war’ against the opposition. He implied that similar methods would be appropriate in Spain. No action was taken against him. 36 In fact, in the test of strength between the ultras and the government, the initiative seemed to be passing to the bunker. Large increases were being decreed in military budgets, with salaries raised by 21 per cent, but this seemed to do little to deepen military loyalty to the new regime. Increasingly, senior officers were informing the government that the process of regional devolution would have to be slowed down. Not to do so could only intensify their hostility to the democratic regime. To do so could only provoke further ETA terrorism, if Building a new world with the bricks of the old: the democratic pact 1977-9 105 provocation were needed."

Increasing Basque violence leading up to Constitution referendum

"The UCD government would never be able to find a political solution to the problem of ETA while it remained incapable of controlling police officers actively hostile to democracy and to Basque aspirations, many of whom belonged to ultra-rightist organizations. Just as Suárez and General Gutiérrez Mellado tried to capture the loyalty of recalcitrant army officers by reacting mildly to signs of indiscipline and by loudly asserting their faith in the military, Martín Villa backed his men in the hope of eventually securing their acceptance of the new regime. Gradually, his policy paid off but the vehemence of many of his declarations severely undermined prospects for peace in the Basque Country. When he was quoted after the Rentería incidents as saying that ‘we make mistakes; they commit murder’, he was effectively confirming to abertzales the ETA claims that Francoist oppression of Euskadi lived on and making it easier for armed resistance to find popular support. Rentería consolidated the common Basque perception of the Spanish forces of order as a rapacious foreign army of occupation."

"Until after Suárez’s resignation in early 1981 and the subsequent military coup, barely a week went by without ETA killing a policeman or a Civil Guard. The lead in indiscriminate terrorism was taken by ETA- Militar. In fact, the crudity and cruelty of some of its political decisions began to diminish its popular support, although hardly enough to help Suárez."

"The wave of killings had led the government to attempt a negotiated truce with ETA. Peace efforts had been made by the Catalan President, Tarradellas, by the Basque
Socialist, José María ‘Txiki’ Benegas, and by Portell, who had earlier acted as go- between in the talks held before the 1977 elections. He had worked out a scheme for ETA’s viewpoints to be made public and debated in the Monday newspaper Hoja del Lunes...ETA’s lack of interest in a negotiated truce was revealed later in November 1978 when Martín Villa went secretly to meet ETA-M representatives in Geneva. Their talks broke down on the deliberately provocative demand that they be crowned with a press photograph session and the issue of a joint communiqué as if each side represented a sovereign nation state.41"

"Military intervention was, in fact, a much more likely consequence of ETA violence Building a new world with the bricks of the old: the democratic pact 1977-9 107 than the popular revolutionary action which ETA-M hoped to provoke. In fact, sympathy for ETA was maintained only because of the continued activities of rightist terror squads and the outbursts of police indiscipline such as that which was to destroy the July 1978 San Fermines in Pamplona. The exaction of a ‘revolutionary tax’ from Basque businessmen was rapidly undermining the tolerance of the PNV and there was mounting evidence of funds being withdrawn from the Basque Country.42 Holding the Basque bourgeoisie in contempt, ETA-M was hardly deterred from its objective. The determination to detonate a military intervention was starkly illustrated on 21 July, the day on which the Cortes was to finish its deliberations about the new Constitution. At 8.30 a.m. General Juan Manuel Sánchez-Ramos Izquierdo and his ADC, Lieutenant- Colonel José Antonio Pérez Rodríguez, were machine-gunned down in a Madrid street. Originally claimed by GRAPO, the killings were later and authoritatively attributed to ETA-M. The fact that neither officer was notably significant within the military structure was ETA-M’s way of announcing that all ranks were at risk in a democratic Spain. Adopting an air of scandalized horror, the ultra-rightist press drew comparisons with the situation prior to the military uprising of 1936. 43

The following five months were marked by an incesssant counterpoint of terrorism and rightist reaction. Both ETA-M and the ultras shared a determination to prevent the new Constitution being put into practice. El Alcázar had followed the elaboration of the text with great hostility, describing it as Communist-inspired and opening the way to drugs, abortion and the dismemberment of Spain."

"As if determined to give credence to the doom-laden prophecies of El Alcázar, ETA- Militar embarked in late August 1978 on a wave of killings of members of the security forces. The immediate objective was to prevent both the parliamentary ratification of the Constitution and the organization of the referendum to give it popular endorsement."

"It was thus in an atmosphere of great tension that the Cortes gave its overwhelming approval for the Constitution, voting on 31 October 1978 by 363 votes for, to 6 against,
with 13 abstentions. In the Senate, similar results were announced: 226 votes for, 5 against and 8 abstentions. The general mood of optimism was diminished only by the
ominous abstention of the PNV. As so often before, the Partido Nacionalista Vasco was playing an ambiguous game. There was little doubt that the bulk of its leadership approved of the Constitution. However, in the fevered atmosphere generated by the extreme abertzales, the PNV did not want to be seen to be in agreement with the government. Accordingly, it called for abstention in the constitutional referendum.46 Inevitably, an intensification of the ETA offensive destroyed the euphoria inspired by the parliamentary unanimity of support for the Constitution. After the thirteen victims of October, ETA-M was to claim another thirteen in the course of November. Determined to smash the referendum campaign, ETA-M stepped up the violence within Euskadi itself."

Operation Galaxia

"The deteriorating political situation had already swung many neutral officers over to the ultra camp. However, although the context favoured their plans, the shrewder heads among the ultras realized that Gutiérrez Mellado’s policy of strategic promotions, timid though it seemed, was gradually undermining their positions. They had tried to counter his efforts by a tactic of progressively applying for transfers to key operational and intelligence units. However, by the autumn of 1978, they felt that it was necessary to exploit their strength before the reformist efforts of Suárez and Gutiérrez Mellado received further legitimation in the constitutional referendum fixed for 6 December. The date chosen for the projected coup was 17 November. ‘Operación Galaxia’, as it came to be known having been plotted in the Cafeteria Galaxia in Madrid, envisaged the seizing at the Moncloa of Suárez and the entire cabinet. It constituted an attempt to add force to the plans first mooted at the previous year’s meeting of Generals at Játiva. By kidnapping the government, the plotters hoped to create a power vacuum which would convince other units of the need to intervene, first to uphold law and order, and then to impose a government of ‘national salvation’ to suspend parliament and launch a ‘dirty war’ against ETA.

17 November was selected because the King was scheduled to be on a state visit to Mexico, the Minister of Defence and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be out of Madrid, and a large number of senior generals to be on promotion courses in Ceuta and the Canary Islands. Furthermore, large contingents of fascists, some of them armed and many in paramilitary uniform, were expected in the capital for the commemoration on 20 November of the third anniversary of Franco’s death. The planned coup was preceded by an orchestrated campaign of propaganda in army barracks. On the morning of 17 November, there took place an incident which seems to have been part of the pre-coup strategy of tension. General Gutiérrez Mellado, on a tour of garrisons to explain the Building a new world with the bricks of the old: the democratic pact 1977-9 109 Constitution, was encountering considerable hostility from officers who had been encouraged by the ultra press to regard such an initiative as the imposition of politics on the army. In Cartagena, the impetuous head of the Levante region of the Civil Guard, General Atarés Peña, shouted out that the Constitution was a lie. General Gutiérrez Mellado ordered him, and anyone who agreed with him, to leave. Atarés left accompanied significantly by Jaime Milans del Bosch, Captain-General of the Third Military Region. On returning to the room to hear Gutiérrez Mellado remark that ‘a general must know how to wear his stars with honour’, Atarés could not control his indignation and insulted the Minister of Defence, calling him ‘freemason, traitor, pig, coward and spy’ to the applause of many officers present. Curiously, General Atarés had been Colonel Tejero’s commanding officer in the Basque Country in 1976.

In fact, whether Atarés Peña’s outburst was aimed to provoke a local rising or not hardly mattered, for the plot had been discovered earlier. One of the conspirators, an infantry major attached to the Police Academy, informed the head of the police, General Timón de Lara, and an investigation was undertaken. On 16 November, Adolfo Suárez was given a full report by the chief of the Intelligence Service of the Civil Guard, Colonel Andrés Casinello Pérez. The two prime movers, Lieutenant- Colonel Antonio Tejero Molina of the Civil Guard and Captain Ricardo Sáenz de Ynestrillas of the police, were arrested. In general, however, the government showed alarming signs of wanting to brush the affair, and its more disturbing implications, under the carpet. Thus, nothing was done to prevent a series of events almost certainly linked with the projected coup. These included the attendance by 500 officers at a fascist ceremony at Franco’s tomb in the Valle de los Caídos on 20 November and the celebration of an international fascist gathering in Madrid two days earlier at which Bias Piñar called for a military uprising. Indeed, the way in which both the Atarés Peña incident and the Galaxia conspiracy were handled did little to diminish the growing conviction in military circles that the democratic regime could be attacked with virtual impunity.

The low-key response of the government was paradoxically a reflection of the profound anxiety instilled by the Galaxia operation. It emerged, for instance, that nearly 200 officers had been contacted by Tejero and Ynestrillas. With the excuse that they did not take the matter seriously, they failed, almost without exception, to report on the planned mutiny. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that many of them were simply waiting on events. In particular, the intelligence services had played a disturbingly ambiguous role. They had failed to discover the conspiracy or, if they had, to inform the government. One senior intelligence and counter-insurgency expert, Lieutenant-Colonel Federico Quintero Morente, who was on a posting to the Operations Division of the General Staff, did find out about the plot. He informed the head of the Division, General Luis Sáez Larumbe. On the grounds that it was ‘a mad fantasy’, Sáez Larumbe chose not to take the matter further. Subsequent investigations gave no grounds for complacency. It appears that units in Burgos, Valladolid, Seville and Valencia were involved and on the alert the night before Galaxia was due to take place. Apparently, it was only the energetic intervention of the liberal General Antonio Pascual Galmés which prevented the crack Division Acorazada de Brunete (DAC) joining in. The Armoured Division was the key to control of Madrid. 48

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the Galaxia business was the fact that Tejero had been able to go about conspiring so freely. He was already notorious as an hysterical opponent of the democratic regime. He had been pushed to extremist positions by his period of service in the Basque Country. Renowned for theatrically embracing the bloody corpses of Civil Guards killed in bomb and sniper attacks by ETA, he developed a bitter hatred of the politicians whom he blamed for failing to smash terrorism. Accordingly, he encouraged his men in the sort of blanket brutality which itself provoked popular support for ETA. At the same time, he began to mix with the ultra-rightists who persuaded him that he could be Spain’s saviour. In September 1976 he had gained notoriety and a certain popularity in the more reactionary circles of the military hierarchy for an impertinent telegram that he sent to the Minister of the Interior, Rodolfo Martín Villa. Tejero was incensed at the legalization of the Basque flag after so many civil guards had died taking down Ikurriñas which had been booby-trapped. His telegram sarcastically requested instructions about the honours to be rendered to the newly authorized flag. 49 After being briefly confined to barracks, he was posted to Malaga. There too he provided ample proof of his inability to refrain from meddling in political matters. Outraged by ETA’s assassination of Augusto Unceta, he came near to provoking a blood-bath on 8 October 1977 when he suppressed a legally permitted demonstration. It was typical of the kid- glove treatment given to rebellious army and Civil Guard officers in the post-Franco period that Tejero was punished for his persistently mutinous attitudes merely by relegation to a desk job. At the Agrupación de Destinos, or postings section, of the Civil Guard, he had ample opportunity to mix with ultras eager to encourage his nascent golpismo. 50

After Galaxia, Tejero was made to serve only seven months’ detention before being given another post in Madrid at the head of a transport unit, where he was able to bask in the adulation of civilian ultras for whom the plot had made him a hero. General Atarés Peña was court-martialled by General Luis Caruana Gómez, the Military Governor of Valencia, who was later to play a significant role in Tejero’s 1981 coup attempt. Caruana absolved Atarés of the charge of indiscipline. Galaxia was in most respects a rehearsal for what was to become the conspiracy of 23 February 1981. That its failure should be followed less than two and a half years later by a more thoroughly planned repeat
performance may be attributed to the weakness of the government’s response in 1978. The minimal punishment was meted out only to those whose involvement was too conspicuous to be ignored. The bunker line was that the Galaxia plot had in reality just been a hypothetical chat in a bar, and official statements presented the events of November 1978 as the wild schemes of an unrepresentative minority, ‘cuatro locos’. Nor was the policy of appeasement confined to the government. All sides of the political spectrum, including the Socialists and Communists, were accomplices in rhetorical wishful thinking about military loyalty. 51 In the following months, however, despite all the confident bluster, the government was to find itself increasingly making concessions to the military hierarchy and turning a blind eye to insubordination."

Basque response to referendum

"ETA-M’s leadership gave no indication that it was in any way disconcerted by Galaxia’s exposure of the effects within the army of its violence. On the contrary, the number of attacks on policemen and Civil Guards in Euskadi increased. In consequence, Building a new world with the bricks of the old: the democratic pact 1977-9 111 the constitutional referendum was held on 6 December in an atmosphere of intense nervousness. The result was a clear popular ratification of the Constitution. However, both the low general turnout and the comparatively high proportion of negative votes in the Basque Country gave cause for concern. Over Spain as a whole, the average abstention rate was 32.3 per cent. The abstentions were some indication of the creeping apathy which was to characterize the last two years of Suárez’s period in office, although they were not dramatically high by European standards. Of those who did vote, 87.79 percent did so affirmatively. The highest levels of abstention, 51.46 per cent were recorded in the Celtic mists of Galicia. The area is renowned for its low indices of politicization and its distrust of Madrid. To make matters worse, polling day was marked by torrential rain. On the other hand, negative votes in Galicia were among the lowest in Spain. 52

Altogether more worrying were the Basque results, with 51.1 per cent abstentions. Of those Basques who did vote, 23.54 per cent cast negative votes. The level of abstention reflected, at least in small villages, an element of fear. Effectively, abstention calls had destroyed in rural areas the secrecy of the ballot since to vote at all implied a rejection of the abertzale parties’ instructions. Suspicion of enthusiasm for the Constitution could incur the displeasure of ETA-M with extremely dangerous consequences. Those who
voted could be easily watched by the more extremist abertzales and reprisals taken against those deemed to be ‘collaborators’. The scale of affirmative votes cast, 76.46 percent, hardly sustains the abertzale claim used to justify continued violence from ETA that Euskadi had rejected the Constitution. 53 None the less, the fact that Basques did vote in relatively substantial numbers against the Constitution dramatically underlined the need to elaborate a satisfactory autonomy statute for Euskadi. In order to get parliamentary authority for such a course, Suárez called general elections for 1 March 1979."

Election '79

"The virulence of ETA’s offensive was perhaps partly a response to the successes of under-cover anti-terrorist hit squads which had killed a number of Etarras, including the ETA-M leader, José Miguel Beñarán Ordeñana, ‘Argala’. Much more so, however, it was related to the negotiations over the Basque autonomy statute. The aim was to push the government into accepting a text which was as near as possible to the maximalist demands of the Koordinadora Abertzale Sozialista, the so-called Alternativa KAS.

The loose KAS coalition had been diminished somewhat by EIA’s inclusion in Euskadiko Eskerra and the gradual evolutionary process of that party to moderation. The remaining abertzale groups had gathered in late 1977 at Alsasua in Navarre under the leadership of the wildly messianic abertzale, Telesforo Monzón. The Mesa de Alsasua (Alsasua Round Table), organized by the ‘Ayatollah Telesforo’, as Monzón was nicknamed, was converted on 28 April 1978 into Herri Batasuna (Popular Unity). An abertzale coalition made up of HASI, LAIA and numerous small left nationalist groups, Herri Batasuna was the fruit of the years of popular demonstrations in favour of amnesty for ETA prisoners. It considered itself to be the antithesis of conventionally organized parties and its radicalism was enshrined in its reliance on the rhetoric of popular assemblies (asamblearismo) for decision-making.

Herri Batasuna was closely linked to ETA-Militar and was devoted to the political implementation of the Alternativa KAS. With its demands for the expulsion of the army and the Civil Guard from Euskadi, for the unification of the French and Spanish Basque provinces and for an independent Basque State, the Alternativa KAS was never going to be negotiable with Madrid. Nevertheless, it was an indication of the hatred engendered by the forces of order and the rightist terror squads that, by 1980, Herri Batasuna was to be the second most important group in Basque politics. Linked as it was to a powerful terrorist organization, Herri Batasuna had a magnetic appeal for many ultra-leftist and ultra-nationalist groups. Moreoever, commitment to the Alternativa KAS guaranteed a constant ferment of militancy. Since ETA-M would continue the armed struggle for the Alternativa KAS, there would always be, no matter how many amnesties were granted, a fresh supply of ETA prisoners as a focus to rally the HB rank and file through amnesty mobilizations. 56

In the elections of 1 March 1979, the impact of Herri Batasuna surpassed all expectations. Indeed, the very fact that there was a lull in ETA-M terrorist activities would be directly attributed to the emergence of the new coalition. A voluntary truce was observed in order to permit an electoral demonstration of ETA-M’s popular support. A communiqué was issued by the leadership calling upon their supporters to vote for Herri Batasuna as an ‘active abstention’. Since the HB candidates had declared their intention of not taking up their parliamentary duties if elected, a vote for the coalition was to be a positive rejection of Madrid and its policies. The fact that the patriarchal Monzón was arrested early on in the campaign for ‘apologia of terrorism’ generated significant abertzale support. At the polls, Monzón was elected to the Cortes for Guipúzcoa and the ETA lawyer, Miguel Castells, to the Senate. Herri Batasuna gained a further two Cortes seats in Vizcaya, one of which was won by Francisco Letamendía who had abandoned Euskadiko Eskerra. This abertzale success indicated the extent to which the government faced real difficulties in the negotiation of the Basque statute. 57

The emergence of Herri Batasuna was not the only surprising thing about the results. During the two months of the campaign, the opinion polls had placed the PSOE slightly in the lead. 58 It was widely assumed that the PSOE would derive considerable benefit from its merger in April 1978 with the Partido Socialista Popular of Enrique Tierno Galván. Despite his greatly inflated academic reputation, the ‘viejo profesor’, as he was known, enjoyed great popularity as well as influence among generations of Socialist intellectuals. Even leaving aside the additional votes that Tierno and the PSP might bring, the UCD was believed to have suffered irremediable attrition in the endless battles against terrorism, unemployment and inflation. Nevertheless, the UCD won the elections, increasing the number of its seats in the Cortes from 165 to 168, while the PSOE rose only from 118 to 121. 59 A number of factors had tipped the balance in UCD’s favour. During the campaign, a statement by the standing committee of the Bishops’ Conference condemning ‘materialist ideologies’ was widely taken to be the Church’s endorsement of UCD. In the PSOE’s southern strongholds, votes were lost to the recently created Partido Socialista de Andalucía, which was rumoured to receive money from UCD’s slush fund or ‘fondo de reptiles’ despite its advocacy of Andalusian nationalism. In the Basque Country, the Socialists’ condemnations of ETA lost them 70,000 votes and three parliamentary seats. So great was abertzale hostility to the PSOE that its campaign meetings were regularly disrupted and, at one in Eibar, Molotov cocktails were thrown. Yet, most crucial of all was the intervention of Suárez. After his silence and isolation during the previous months, he used his television charisma to dazzling effect. This was particularly true of his final speech on the eve of the elections in which he launched a devastating attack on the PSOE as the Marxist party of abortion and divorce. It was a blatant appeal for the ‘voto de miedo’ or the fear vote which was calculated to have swayed over one million undecided voters. 60

The election campaign generated far less popular enthusiasm than had been witnessed during the euphoric scenes of 1977. It was understandable that, after two referendums and now the second general election in just two years, the abstention rate should rise to 33.6 per cent. The voting age had been lowered to eighteen, increasing the electorate by three and a half million, yet the number of votes cast was down on the 1977 figure by over 300,000. After the boom years of student militancy, this was now the period of the pasotas, an other-worldly cross between punks and hippies who rejected politics altogether. All the parties experienced a drop in militant fervour. Members of the Communist Youth complained that the only political activity left for them was to stick posters on walls or sweep out party headquarters. Veterans of the anti-Franco struggle joked nostalgically that ‘Contra Franco vivíamos mejor’ (‘Against Franco, we lived better’), a pun on the rightist catch-phrase ‘Con Franco, vivíamos mejor’. In the case of the PCE, a dramatic fall in membership was largely a reaction to the sclerotic leadership team brought back from exile by Carrillo. Bit by bit, the Stalinist habits of these ‘Parisians’ repelled many of the party’s best and brightest young militants. 61"

Internal PSOE struggles

"However, the PSOE too was to experience a serious internal crisis after its ebullient doubling of membership over the previous two years. As the PSOE came nearer to
gaining power, its leadership became progressively more embarrassed by the party’s official definition of itself as Marxist. At the same time, the consolidation of a social democrat image, which was shown by opinion polls to be electorally successful, was resented by a radical section of the party. 62 Throughout the 1979 election campaign, Felipe González worked hard to project moderation and statesmanship and to dampen the extremism of some of the unskilled and unemployed workers who thronged his meetings. The electoral benefit derived by Suárez’s last-minute attack on PSOE Marxism intensified the Secretary-General’s determination to resolve the contradictions within his party. Given the Socialists’ pre-election expectations, defeat was traumatic. There was no shortage of cautious voices to suggest that it was all for the best and to express a rhetorical relief at not having to take on the mantle of power yet. Whether merely a way of diminishing the pain of defeat or genuine, such remarks implied a belief that it was still too soon after the death of Franco for the right to tolerate peacefully a transition to a Socialist government. That the electorate or sections of the PSOE really believed this to be the case is difficult to say with certainty. The leadership, however, was convinced that it was the party’s radical image which made such speculation possible.

In fact, difficulties had been brewing in the PSOE for some time. Felipe González was almost universally admired, both within and without the PSOE, for his honesty, common sense and warm humanity. Behind the scenes, the day-to-day tasks of running the party were left to his lifelong crony, the acerbic Alfonso Guerra, once hysterically described by Abril Martorell as ‘the Spanish Josef Goebbels’. Guerra ruled the PSOE’s local federations with an iron hand. However, after the party’s vertiginous growth throughout 1977 and 1978, even Guerra with his legendary capacity for work found it difficult to impose homogeneity over ideological and generational disparities. In early 1978 the PSOE had absorbed the Federación de Partidos Socialistas, a disparate collection of regional groupings whose leadership included a number of technocrats who were later to be ministers in the first Socialist government—Enrique Barón, Eduardo Barrionuevo and Julián Campo. In May of the same year, the small but prestigious Partido Socialista Popular of Tierno Galván had been taken over. A similar process led to the fusion in July of the various Catalan Socialist parties with the PSOE.63

The incorporation of these new groups swamped the PSOE with senior cadres much to the chagrin of those who had been longer in the party. The new arrivals had negotiated their insertion directly into the higher ranks of the PSOE with the Seville-Basque axis which had led the party since 1974. Inevitably, they consolidated the strength of the Felipe González-Alfonso Guerra leadership. This was especially galling for the Madrid- based group of Pablo Castellano, Luis Gómez Llorente, Francisco Bustelo and others who had kept the PSOE alive in the capital during the late fifties and throughout the sixties. They regarded the parachute landing of the new technocrats as leading the party in an unacceptably social democrat direction. Their suspicions were aroused on 8 May 1978 when Felipe González announced to a group of journalists in Barcelona that, at the next PSOE Congress, he would propose the elimination of the party’s definition as exclusively Marxist. In fact, Felipe González’s shrewd attempt to contest the middle ground between the PSOE and the UCD bore fruit in Socialist victories in the Senate by- election held on 17 May 1978 in Asturias and Alicante. 64

The ideological misgivings of the Madrid group were compounded by resentment in the provinces of Alfonso Guerra’s high-handed manipulation of the party apparatus. This became particularly acute during the compilation of lists of candidates for the March 1979 elections. The imposition of candidates from party headquarters in Madrid, together with the rigid discipline and personal loyalty that Guerra demanded—and usually inspired—from the PSOE’s paid officials, led to considerable discontent in Extremadura, Valencia, Aragon and, above all, in Galicia. There were numerous resignations in protest, of which the most notable was that of Modesto Seara Vázquez, the ambitious Secretary- General of the party in Galicia, who accused Guerra of Stalinism.65 The various resentments of González’s ideological moderation and Guerra’s tough administrative centralism came to a head at the PSOE’s XXVIII Congress held in Madrid from 17 to 20 May 1979. The dramatic events there ultimately hinged on the relationship between the PSOE’s ideological stances and its electoral ambitions. One crucial factor was the extent to which, during the previous two years, Suárez had taken the UCD into social democrat territory felt by many PSOE leaders more properly to correspond to the Socialists. Moreover, by the time that the XXVIII Congress assembled, victory for the PSOE in the municipal elections held on 3 April had convinced the Socialist leadership that only fear of the party’s Marxism had prevented similar success in the general elections. 66

The delegates to the XXVIII Congress were predominantly activists elected by local provincial PSOE groups. Only 30 per cent of them were paid party bureaucrats controllable by the apparatus. The remainder felt free to give vent to their dissatisfaction with the rightward electoralist trend of the party. Felipe González, however, refused to play to the gallery. In his opening speech in defence of the outgoing executive, he accepted the usefulness of Marxism as an analytical tool without acknowledging it as the party’s absolute and exclusive value system. He recommended to the delegates that their efforts at the Congress be directed towards the elaboration of a project capable of mobilizing the different sectors of society’. On the following day, 18 May, the committee encharged with the party’s ideological definition (the ponencia ideológica) produced a text which reaffirmed the PSOE’s character as a Marxist, class party. When this was accepted by the plenary session of 19 May, the corridors seethed with conspiracy. It was widely assumed that Felipe González would seek a compromise with the críticos. However, in a moving and historic speech, he announced to a shocked assembly on 20 May his determination not to stand again for the post of Secretary-General, a decision seconded by the entire executive.

The critics of Felipe González found themselves in the position of the sorcerer’s apprentice. Although Pablo Castellano was reported in the press as having told Luis Gómez Llorente that he was to be the next Secretary-General, the críticos recoiled from picking up the crown. There were a number of reasons for this. They were taken rather by surprise and had not had time to concoct a full candidacy for all the leadership positions. They were also taken aback by the panic with which the bereft delegates had reacted to Felipe González’s gesture. More practically, it was intimated to them that Guerra’s loyal party functionaries would simply not work for them if they tried to take over. Moreover, they knew that the bulk of the parliamentary party was solidly ‘Felipista’. Finally, Enrique Tierno Galván, who had played an ambiguous and opportunistic role in the schemes of the críticos now pulled back and began to talk of the negative way in which the Church, the army and the banks would react to an ultra-leftist PSOE. Accordingly, with the críticos paralysed, a steering committee, the comisión gestora, was set up to arrange an extraordinary congress at which efforts would be made to resolve the split. 67

With the extraordinary congress scheduled for late September, Felipe González spent the summer of 1979 touring the provinces and explaining his stance to the rank-and-file militants. At the same time, Alfonso Guerra tightened his control of the party apparatus. He was immensely helped by a change in party regulations as a result of which the individual election of delegates by each town was replaced by the elaboration of provincial or regional block delegations. 68 At the extraordinary congress, which was held in Madrid on 28 and 29 September, there were fifty as opposed to the one thousand delegations of the XXVIII Congress. Moreover, the delegation chairmen more or less exercised a block vote. Guerra himself had total control of the largest delegation, the Andalusian, with 25 per cent of the total votes. With the entire national press and the television supporting Felipe González, it was perhaps inevitable that the críticos would suffer a humiliating rout. The moderates were victorious all along the line, with the críticos relegated to a marginal position. Henceforth, the establishment of socialism would take a back seat to the immediate task of winning elections and completing the democratic transformation of the country. The Secretary-General himself had increased his stature sevenfold and was acclaimed across the political spectrum as a future national leader.

By contrast, Suárez’s star was on the wane. One symptom of this was UCD’s disappointing performance in the municipal elections of 3 April 1979. They were a crucial stage of the transition to democracy. Despite the dramatic progress made in Spain, local administration remained unreformed. It was, of course, an area in which people felt better able to express their political preferences than they did in national elections where the fear factor remained potent after forty years of Francoism and the subsequent rumblings of the army. Accordingly, the PSOE and the PCE between them gained control of twenty-seven provincial capitals, representing 10,500,000 people. In contrast, the UCD, although gaining many rural municipalities, won only twenty-three provincial capitals, representing just 2,500,000 people. Herri Batasuna captured 15 per cent of the Basque vote and control of a number of small towns. 7"

Conclusion

"The view soon gained currency that the new cabinet was a team which had neither the drive nor the imagination to resolve the problems of regional autonomy, terrorism, unemployment and military subversion. It was dominated by the President’s close friend Abril Martorell who became second Vice-President with responsibility for economic affairs. General Gutiérrez Mellado remained as Vice-President for National Security and Defence, although the Ministry of Defence went, for the first time since before the Civil War, to a civilian, Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún. The impression of mediocrity derived from the departure of major figures. Rodolfo Martín Villa had asked to be replaced at the Ministry of the Interior after three years of intense and exhausting labour. Unable to find a suitable substitute, after Martín Villa’s Under-secretary Jesús Sancho Rof (called ‘the Sheriff’ by Alfonso Guerra) had refused, Suárez turned to General Antonio Ibáñez Freire. Francisco Fernández Ordóñez, the leader of the Social Democrats within UCD, who had been rumoured to have flirted with the PSOE, was replaced by one of his younger followers, Jaime García Añoveros. In fact, in addition to the problems that he met in forming a cabinet, Suárez was suffering pain and discomfort from a dental complication which made it increasingly difficult for him to talk. 72

It was hardly surprising then that, a mere two months after his general election victory, the press could be found to be complaining of the President’s isolation and paralysis. The opinion of the politically aware public was summed up by a daubing on a Madrid wall which read ‘Franco estaba loco: se creía Suárez’ (‘Franco was mad: he thought he was Suárez’). 73 Even leaving aside his health, the problems faced by the Prime Minister were sufficiently daunting to provoke some kind of withdrawal. The achievements of the two years since the elections of 15 June 1977 were considerable—the Pacto de la Moncloa, the Constitution, the beginnings of autonomy legislation—but they were far from spectacular. In contrast, the negative features of terrorism, crime and military subversion captured the headlines virtually every day. ETA-Militar was more committed to violence than it had been two years before and now it actually had the backing of a coalition ofpolitical parties, Herri Batasuna, which enjoyed the support of at least 15 per cent of the
Basque population. The dominance of the ultras in the army, and especially in the intelligence services and key units such as the DAC at Brunete, was greater than ever. After its recent election defeat, the PSOE was also about to undergo the process which would eventually lead it to power in 1982. It could be argued that Suárez’s moment had passed. The historic task of steering democratic reform through the Francoist institutions had been fulfilled. For that, albeit pushed down the road to democratization by pressure from the opposition, Suárez had been the perfect man. Torcuato Fernández Miranda once said, with incomparable arrogance, that the drama of the transition had had an impresario, Juan Carlos, a script-writer, himself, and an actor, Adolfo Suárez. 74 In fact, Suárez was an actor who, in a given situation, was able to make up many of his own best lines. That situation prevailed no more. With the audience becoming ever more restless, Suárez sat in his dressing-room wondering how the play would end."

Chapter 6: Chronicle of a death foretold: the fall of Suárez 1979–81