It’s possible that these similarities were blindingly obvious to both as soon as they met at the end of February 1977, but it’s certain that neither of the two would have sealed the pact they sealed with the other had they not both understood long before that they needed each other to prevail in politics, because at that moment Suárez had the power of Francoism but Carrillo had the legitimacy of anti-Francoism, and Suárez needed legitimacy as much as Carrillo needed power; something else is certain: since they were both pure politicians, they would not have sealed that pact if they hadn’t believed that the country could do without their individual alliance, but not that of the collective alliance between the two irreconcilable Spains they represented, and which also needed each other. In spite of that, one might well assume that for Suárez, raised in the Manichaean claustrophobia of the dictatorship, it would be surprising to recognize his intimate kinship with the dictatorship’s official bad guy; one might also assume that Carrillo’s surprise would be even greater upon realizing that a young provincial Falangist was competing advantageously with the skill of an experienced old politician — whose heroic reputation in war and exile, international prestige and absolute power in the Party lent him the image of a demigod — forcing him to liquidate in a few months the strategy for post-Francoism he’d planned and maintained for years and to follow the path the younger man had marked out.
The story of that liquidation and its consequences is in part the story of the change from dictatorship to democracy and without it the unbreakable link between Santiago Carrillo and Adolfo Suárez that lasted for years cannot be understood; neither can 23 February; nor, perhaps, the twin gesture of these two twins on the evening of 23 February, while the bullets whizzed around the chamber of the Cortes. The story begins at some moment in 1976. Let’s say it begins on 3 July 1976, the same day the King appoints Adolfo Suárez Prime Minister amid generalized stupor. By then, after thirty-six years of exile, Santiago Carrillo had been living clandestinely in Madrid for six months, in a house on the Viso housing estate, convinced that he needed to gauge the country’s reality and cement his hold on the Party within the country so the Communists would be able to assert themselves as the most numerous, most active and best organized political force of opposition to the regime in the emerging post-Francoism. By then exactly a year had gone by since Carrillo initiated the dismantling or undermining or ideological demolition of the PCE with the aim of presenting it to Spanish society as a modern party free of the old Stalinist dogmatism: in July 1975 along with Enrico Berlinguer and Georges Marchais — leaders of the Italian and French Communists — he’d founded Euro-Communism, an ambiguous and heterodox version of Communism that proclaimed its independence from the Soviet Union, its rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its respect for parliamentary democracy. By then it had been exactly three decades since the PCE had elaborated the so-called policy of national reconciliation, which in practice meant that the Party renounced the aim of overthrowing the regime by force and was confident that a non-violent national strike could paralyse the country so that power would be handed over to a provisional government composed of all the parties of the democratic opposition, whose first task would be to call free elections. By then, however, Carrillo had already become aware that, in spite of this still being official Party policy, the anti-Francoist organizations on their own lacked the strength to finish off the prolongation of Francoism embodied at that moment by the monarchy; he was no less aware, if the objective was bloodlessly to install a democracy in Spain, sooner or later the political parties of the opposition would have to end up negotiating with reform-inclined representatives of the regime — now that they could no longer break Francoism to impose democracy they had to negotiate the rupture of Francoism with Francoists lucid enough or resigned enough to accept that the only future for Francoism was democracy — a change of strategy that did not begin to be glimpsed in official PCE doctrine until the beginning of 1976 when the Secretary General introduced a terminological nuance into his speech and stopped talking about the ‘democratic rupture’ to talk about the ‘negotiated rupture’.
So, Carrillo received the unexpected news of Suárez’s appointment at a moment of total uncertainty and certain despondency, knowing that, although it seemed strong, his party was still weak, and that, although it seemed weak, Francoism was still strong. His response to the news was as unexpected as the news itself, or at least it was for the officials and members of his party, which like the democratic opposition and regime’s reformers and the majority of public opinion considered the choice of the last Secretary General of the Movimiento meant the end of their liberalizing hopes and the triumph of the reactionaries of the regime. On 7 July, four days after the appointment of Suárez and barely a few hours after he announced on television that his government’s aim was to achieve democratic normalization (‘That the governments of the future may be the result of the free will of the Spanish people,’ he’d said), Carrillo published in the weekly Mundo Obrero, clandestine organ of the PCE, an article full of benevolent scepticism towards the new Prime Minister: he didn’t believe that Suárez was capable of fulfilling his promises, he wasn’t even sure if they were sincere, but he recognized that his language and tone were not those of a usual Falangist leader and that his good proposals deserved to be given the benefit of the doubt. ‘The Suárez government,’ he concluded, ‘could serve to bring about the negotiation that leads to the agreed rupture.’