The coup d’état does not materialize, although the 23 February coup began to be hatched then — because the military never forgave Suárez for legalizing the Communist Party and from that moment on did not stop plotting against the treacherous Prime Minister — but the PCE could only digest such pragmatism and so many concessions snatched from them by the threat of a coup d’état with much difficulty. According to Carrillo’s predictions, the result of his pact of prudence over the last year and of half a century’s monopoly of anti-Francoism would be an electoral triumph of millions of votes that would turn his party into the second biggest in the country after Suárez’s party and would turn him and Suárez into the two great protagonists of democracy; it didn’t happen like that: like a mummy that disintegrates on exhumation, in the elections of 15 June 1977 the PCE received just over 9 per cent of the vote, less than half of what they expected and less than a third of that of the PSOE, which surprisingly took over the leadership of the left because it was able to absorb the caution and disenchantment of many Communist sympathizers and also because it offered an image of youth and modernity in contrast to the old candidates of the PCE coming back from exile, the Communist old guard starting with Carrillo himself who evoked for voters the frightening past of the war and blocked the renovation of the Party by the young Communists from inside the country. Although Carrillo never felt defeated, Suárez had won again: for the Prime Minister the legalization of the PCE was an unqualified success, because it made democracy credible by integrating the Communists, blocked the man he considered his most dangerous rival at the polls and gained him a lasting ally; for the Communists’ Secretary General it was not a failure, but nor was it the success he’d hoped for: although the legalization of the PCE assured that Suárez’s reform truly was a rupture with Francoism and that the consequence of the rupture would be a real democracy, the things they were forced to concede by the way it was carried out, abandoning the symbols and diluting the traditional postulates of the organization, made the dream of making the Communist Party the hegemonic party of the left even more distant. The response of the PCE to this electoral fiasco was what was maybe to be expected from an organization marked by a history of assent to the dictates of its Secretary General and imbued with its unappeasable historic mission of an ideology in retreat: instead of admitting their errors in the light of reality with the aim of correcting them, they attributed their own errors to reality. The Party convinced itself (or more precisely the Secretary General convinced the Party) that it hadn’t been them but the voters who’d been mistaken: two short months of legality had not been able to counteract forty years of anti-Communist propaganda, but the PSOE would waste no time in demonstrating their immaturity and inconsistency and the following elections would return to the PCE their rightful role of first party of the opposition that the Socialists had usurped, given that in Spain there were no serious parties other than the PCE and the UCD or any real political leaders other than Santiago Carrillo and Adolfo Suárez.
Unexpectedly, after the first elections Carrillo’s predictions seemed to be starting to come true and he could for a time dazzle his comrades with the illusion that the defeat had in reality been a victory or the best preparation for victory. ‘Of all the Spanish political leaders,’ wrote Le Monde in October 1977, ‘Santiago Carrillo is undoubtedly the one who has come to the fore most rapidly and with most authority in recent months.’ That’s how it was: in a very short time, all over the country, Carrillo won a vigorous reputation as a responsible politician who contributed to making the PCE appear to be a solid party capable of governing and that deserved much greater relevance than its poor electoral results seemed to indicate. His understanding with Suárez was perfect, and his whole political strategy of those years revolved around a proposal that meant to institutionalize it and to armour-plate the democracy they would construct between the two of them or that he thought they should construct between the two of them: the government of national unity. The formula resembled in name only what the majority of the ruling class was discussing or sponsoring in the months before 23 February (and which facilitated it): this was no government headed by a soldier but a government headed by Suárez and supported by the UCD and the PCE although with the cooperation of other political parties; according to Carrillo, only the fortitude of a government like that could bring stability to the country while they drew up the Constitution, strengthened democracy and warded off the danger of a coup d’état, and the Pacts of Moncloa — an important ensemble of social and economic measures designed to overcome the national economic crisis stemming from the first worldwide oil crisis, negotiated by Carrillo and Suárez and then signed by the main political parties and ratified by the Cortes in October 1977 — constituted for the Secretary General of the PCE the foretaste of this unitary government. Carrillo reiterated his proposal over and over again and, although at some moment he had hints that Suárez was thinking of accepting it, the government of national unity never came to be formed: it’s very possible that Suárez would have happily governed along with Carrillo, but he probably never considered it seriously, maybe because he feared the reaction of the military and of a large part of society. In spite of that, Carrillo continued to sustain Suárez in the certainty that sustaining Suárez meant sustaining democracy, which made him an indispensable support of the system and meant that, although he didn’t obtain the benefit of power, he obtained national and international respect: after the signing of the Pacts of Moncloa Carrillo received a standing ovation in the Cortes from the UCD deputies and a welcome into the country’s most conservative forums for debate; around the same time he travelled to the United Kingdom and France and became the first Secretary General of a Communist Party allowed to enter the United States, where he was hailed by Time magazine as ‘the apostle of Euro-Communism’. In the short term this was the result of his alliance with Suárez: during those years Carrillo personified a sort of oxymoron, democratic Communism; in the long term the result was his undoing.