Suárez was not daunted: that was undoubtedly the reception he expected — given his trajectory, he couldn’t have expected any other — and it was also the reception that best suited him. Because if the King had charged him with dismantling Francoism to set up a parliamentary monarchy with its pieces, liquidating the dead that still seemed alive and bringing to life what seemed dead, the first thing he needed to count on was the complicity (or at least the confidence, or at least the passivity) of Francoist orthodoxy; the second thing he needed to count on was the comprehension (or at least the tolerance, or at least the patience) of the clandestine opposition. He embarked on this double, self-evidently impossible task from the first moment. Machiavelli recommends the politician ‘keep the minds of his subjects in suspense and admiration’, and link his actions with the object of not allowing his adversaries ‘the time to work steadily against him’. Perhaps Suárez had not read Machiavelli, but he followed his advice to the letter, and as soon as he was named Prime Minister began a sprint of coups de théâtre of such speed and confidence that no one could muster the reasons, resources or enthusiasm to stop him: the day after he took office he read a televised message in which, with a political language, tone and form incompatible with the tattered starch of Francoism, promised concord and reconciliation by way of a democracy in which governments would be ‘the result of the will of the majority of the Spanish people’, and the next day he formed with the help of his Deputy Prime Minister Alfonso Osorio an extremely youthful cabinet composed of Falangists and Christian Democrats who had good relations with the democratic opposition and the economic powers; one day he presented a programmatic declaration, virtually breaking with Francoism, in which the government committed itself to ‘the devolution of sovereignty to the Spanish people’, and announced a general election before 30 June of the coming year, the next day he reformed by decree the Penal Code that prevented the legalization of the parties and the day after that he decreed an amnesty for political crimes; one day he granted the heretofore banned Catalan language equal official status and the next he declared the banned Basque flag legal; one day he announced a law that authorized the repeal of the Fundamental Laws of Francoism and the next day he got the Francoist Cortes to pass it and the following day he called a referendum to approve it and the day after that he won it; one day he abolished by decree the Movimiento Nacional and the next day he ordered all the Falangist symbols to be removed secretly overnight from all the façades of all the Movimiento buildings and the following day he legalized the Communist Party by surprise and the day after that he called the first free elections in forty years. That was his way of proceeding during his first eleven-month term of government: he made an unusual decision and, as the country was still trying to take it in, he made another more unusual decision, and then another even more unusual, and then one more; he was constantly improvising; he swept events along, but also allowed himself to be swept along by them; he allowed no time to react, or to work against him, or to notice the disparity between what he did and what he said, no time even for admiration, or no more than he gave himself: all his adversaries could do was remain in suspense, attempt to understand what he was doing and try to keep up.
At the beginning of his mandate his main objective was to convince the Francoists and the democratic opposition that the reform he was going to carry out was the only way they would both achieve their conflicting purposes. He assured the Francoists that they’d have to renounce certain elements of Francoism in order to ensure the survival of Francoism; he assured the democratic opposition that they’d have to renounce certain elements of the break with Francoism in order to ensure the break with Francoism. To everyone’s surprise, he convinced them all. First he convinced the Francoists and, when he’d convinced them, he convinced the opposition: he completely deceived the Francoists, but not the opposition, or not entirely, or no more than he deceived himself, but he did as he pleased with them, obliged them to play on the field that he chose and by the rules he devised and, once he’d won the match, put them to work in his service. How did he achieve it? In a certain sense, with the same histrionic methods of seduction with which Emmanuele Bardone persuaded Italians and Germans alike that there was no one in the world more important than them and that he was ready to do anything for their cause, and with the same chameleon-like gifts with which Bardone convinced the Germans that he was a fervent supporter of the Reich and the Italians that he was an undercover adversary of the Reich. If he was almost always unbeatable on television, because he mastered it better than any other politician, face to face he was even better: he could sit down alone with a Falangist, with an Opus Dei technocrat or with a Guerrillero de Cristo Rey and the Falangist, technocrat or paramilitary would say goodbye to him with the certainty that deep down he was a paramilitary, a Falangist or a defender of Opus; he could sit down with a soldier and, remembering his time as a reserve second lieutenant, say: Don’t worry, deep down I’m still a soldier; he could sit with a monarchist and say: I am first and foremost a monarchist; he could sit down with a Christian Democrat and say: In reality, I’ve always been a Christian Democrat; he could sit with a Social Democrat and say: What I am, deep down, is a Social Democrat; he could sit with a Socialist or a Communist and say: I’m no Communist (or Socialist), but I am one of you, because my family was Republican and deep down I’ve never stopped being one. He’d say to the Francoists: Power must be ceded to win legitimacy and conserve power; to the democratic opposition he’d say: I have power and you have legitimacy: we have to understand each other. Everyone heard from Suárez what they needed to hear and everyone came out of those interviews enchanted by his kind-heartedness, his modesty, seriousness and receptiveness, his excellent intentions and his will to convert them into deeds; as for him, he wasn’t yet Prime Minister of a democratic government, but, just as Bardone tried to act the way he thought General Della Rovere would have acted from the moment he entered the prison, from the moment of his appointment as Prime Minister he tried to act the way he thought a prime minister of a democratic government would act: like Bardone, everything he saw and felt helped him to perfect his interpretation; like Bardone, he soon began to steep himself in the political and moral cause of the democratic parties; like Bardone, he deceived with such sincerity that not even he knew he was deceiving.
That was how over the course of that short first year in government Suárez constructed the foundations of a democracy out of the materials of a dictatorship by successfully carrying out unusual operations, the most unusual of which — and perhaps the most essential — entailed the liquidation of Francoism at the hands of the Francoists themselves. The idea he owed to Fernández Miranda, but Suárez was much more than simply its executor: he studied it, he got it ready and he put it into practice. It was almost about achieving the squaring of a circle, and in any case reconciling the irreconcilable to eliminate what was dead and seemed alive; at heart it was about a legal ruse based on the following reasoning: Franco’s Spain was ruled by an ensemble of Fundamental Laws that, as the dictator himself had often stressed, were perfect and offered perfect solutions for any eventuality; however, the Fundamental Laws could be perfect only if they could be modified — otherwise they wouldn’t have been perfect, because they wouldn’t have been capable of adapting to any eventuality — the plan conceived by Fernández Miranda and deployed by Suárez consisted of devising a new Fundamental Law, the Law for Political Reform, which would be added to the rest, apparently modifying them though actually repealing them or authorizing them to be repealed, which allowed the change of a dictatorial regime for a democratic regime respecting the legal procedures of the first. The sophistry was brilliant, but needed to be approved by the Francoist Cortes in an unprecedented act of collective immolation; its implementation was vertiginous: by the end of August 1976 a draft of the law was already prepared, at the beginning of September Suárez announced it on television and over the next two months threw himself into battle on all fronts to convince the Francoist representatives to accept their suicide. The strategy he devised to achieve it was a wonder of precision and swindle: while from his position as President of the Cortes Fernández Miranda threw spanners in the works of the law’s detractors, they put in charge of its presentation and defence the nephew of the founder of the Falange and member of the Council of the Kingdom, Miguel Primo de Rivera, who would ask them to vote in favour ‘in memory of Franco’; in the weeks before the plenary session, Suárez, his ministers and top government officials, after dividing up the procuradores, as the Francoist Cortes members were called, opposed to or reluctant to support the project, breakfasted, had aperitifs, lunched and dined with them, flattering them with brimming promises and tangling them in traps for the gullible; only in a few cases did they have to resort to unveiled threats, but with one group of recalcitrant members there was nothing for it but to pack them off on a Caribbean cruise on a junket to Panama. Finally, on 18 November, after three consecutive days of debate during which on more than one occasion it seemed like everything was going to fall through, the Cortes voted on the law; the result was unequivocaclass="underline" 425 votes in favour, 59 against and 13 abstentions. The reform was approved. The television cameras captured the moment, and it’s since been reproduced on a multitude of occasions. The members of the Francoist Cortes stand and applaud; standing up, Suárez applauds the Francoist procuradores. He looks emotional; he looks like he’s on the verge of tears; there is no reason to think he’s pretending or, like the consummate actor he is, if he is pretending, that he’s not feeling what he’s pretending to feel. The truth is he might as well have been laughing inside and crying his eyes out for the bunch of fools who’ve just signed their own death sentence amid the embraces and congratulations of a tremendous Francoist fiesta.