It was a spectacular sleight of hand, and the greatest success of his life. In Spain the democratic opposition rubbed their eyes; outside Spain the incredulity was totaclass="underline" ‘stunning victory for suárez’, ran the headline in the New York Times; ‘cortes appointed by dictator have buried francoism’, said Le Monde. A few days later, allowing himself not an instant’s respite or his adversaries any time to recover from their stupor, he called a referendum on the recently approved law; it was held on 15 December and he won it with almost 80 per cent participation and almost 95 per cent of the votes in favour. For the Francoists and for the democratic opposition, who had advocated voting against or abstaining, the setback was conclusive; much more so for the former than for the latter, of course: from that moment on the Francoists could resort only to violence, and the week of 23 to 28 January — in which far-right groups murdered nine people in a pre-war atmosphere and Suárez was certain someone would attempt a coup d’état — was the first notice that they were ready to employ it; as for the democratic opposition, they found themselves obliged to discard the chimera of imposing their outright clean break with Francoism to accept the unexpected and tricky reforming break imposed by Suárez and began to negotiate with him, divided, messed up and weakened, under terms he had chosen and that best suited him. Furthermore, by then, around February 1977, it was already clear to everyone that Suárez was going to fulfil the task the King and Fernández Miranda had entrusted to him in record time; in fact, once the Rubicon of the Law for Political Reform was crossed, Suárez had only to finalize the dismantling of the legal and institutional framework of Francoism and call free elections after agreeing with the political parties the requisites of their legalization and participation in the elections. In theory his job ended there, that in theory was the end of the show, but by then Suárez already believed in his character and was elated, riding the biggest wave of the tsunami of his success, so nothing would have seemed more absurd to him than giving up the position he’d always dreamt of; it may be, however, that this was the King’s and Fernández Miranda’s intention when they gave him the starring role in that drama of seductions, half-truths and deceits, sure as they were perhaps that the charming and smooth nonentity would burn out on stage, sure as they were in any case that he would be incapable of managing the complexities of the state in normal conditions, and even more so after democratic elections: once these were called and his task concluded, Suárez should retire behind the curtain, amid applause and tokens of gratitude, to cede the favour of the spotlight to a real statesman, perhaps Fernández Miranda himself, perhaps the eternally prime ministerial Fraga, perhaps the Deputy Prime Minister Alfonso Osorio, perhaps the cultivated, elegant and aristocratic José María de Areilza. Of course, Suárez could have ignored the King’s intention, forced his hand and stood for election without his consent, but he was the Prime Minister appointed by the King and he wanted to be the King’s candidate and then the King’s Prime Minister-elect, and during those brilliant months, while he gradually freed himself of Fernández Miranda’s tutelage and paid less and less attention to Osorio, he worked hard at demonstrating to the King that he was the Prime Minister he needed because he was the only politician able to establish the monarchy by assembling a democracy just as he’d dismantled Francoism; he also worked at demonstrating that by contrast Fernández Miranda was just a spineless, old, unreal jurist, Fraga an indiscriminate bulldozer, Osorio a politician as pompous as he was inane and Areilza a well-dressed dead loss.
All this would become clear to the King at the beginning of April when Suárez pulled the most audacious move of his career, another death-defying political leap, but this time with no net: the legalization of the Communist Party. That measure was the limit the military had placed on the reform and which Suárez had seemed to accept or had made them believe he accepted; perhaps at first he really did accept it, but, as he became steeped in his character of democratic Prime Minister without democracy and he absorbed the reasons of an opposition pushing him from the street with popular demonstrations and forcing him to go much further than he had planned on the path of reform, Suárez understood he needed the Communist Party as much as the Communist Party needed him. Towards the end of February he’d already made one decision and had come up with an idea for a high-wire juggling act like the one that let Franco’s Cortes sacrifice themselves, except this time he chose to carry it out practically alone and practically in secret: first, with the disagreement of Fernández Miranda and Osorio but the agreement of the King, he held a secret meeting with Santiago Carrillo and sealed with him a pact of steel; then he sought to cover his back with a legal opinion from the Supreme Court favourable to the legalization and, when they refused him, he manoeuvred to get it out of the Attorney General’s Office; then he sounded out the military ministers and sowed confusion among them, ordering General Gutiérrez Mellado to warn them that the PCE could be legalized (they were waiting for a judicial proceeding, Gutiérrez Mellado told them, and also if they wanted some clarification the Prime Minister was prepared to provide it), although he didn’t tell them when or how or even if it was effectively going to be legalized, a juggling act within the juggling act with which he intended to avoid the charge from the military ministers that he hadn’t informed them and at the same time to prevent them from reacting against his decision before it was announced; then he waited for the Easter holidays, sent the King and Queen on a trip to France, Carrillo to Cannes, his ministers on vacation and, with the streets of the big cities deserted and the barracks deserted and the editorial offices of the newspapers and radio and television stations deserted, he stayed alone in Madrid, playing cards with General Gutiérrez Mellado. Finally, again with the King’s support and Osorio’s opposition and without even consulting Fernández Miranda, on Easter Saturday — the most deserted day of those deserted days — he legalized the PCE. It was a bombshell, and it very nearly blew up in his hands: he’d made that wild decision because triumphs had given him an absolute confidence in himself and, although he expected the shock to the Army would be brutal and that there would be protests and threats and perhaps outbreaks of rebellion, reality outdid his worst predictions, and at some moments during the four insane days that followed Easter Saturday, maybe Suárez thought more than once that he’d overestimated his strengths and that a coup d’état was inevitable, until on the fifth day he once again translated the imminent catastrophe into his own gain: he kept the utmost pressure on Carrillo until he managed to persuade the Party publicly to renounce some of its symbols and accept all those the Army considered threatened by their legalization: the monarchy, the unity of the nation and the red-and-yellow flag. At this point it all stopped. The soldiers stayed in their barracks, the whole country must have held its breath and Suárez scored a double victory: on the one hand he managed to tame the military — or at least tame them for the moment — forcing them to swallow what was for them an indigestible decision and for him (and for democracy) an indispensable one; on the other hand he managed to tame the Communist Party — and with the Communist Party, not much later, the whole democratic opposition — forcing them to join the project of the parliamentary monarchy unreservedly, turning the eternal adversary into the principal support of the system. To finish off the fluke, Suárez had converted Fernández Miranda and Osorio into two suddenly antiquated politicians, ready for retirement, and everything was ready to call the first democratic elections in forty years and win them by capitalizing on the success of his reforms.