He called them and won them, and along the way also eliminated Fraga and Areilza, his last two rivals. The first he shelved away in an antediluvian party where they flailed at the fugitive glories of the Francoist exodus; on the second he took no pity. Suárez had no party of his own with which to stand for election, so for months, crouched down, plotting from a distance and playing along with the bluff that he wasn’t even going to stand as a candidate, he waited while a huge coalition of centrist parties formed around a party led by Areilza; once the coalition was formed, he pounced on it and, strengthened by the generalized certainty that the electoral list headed by his prestige as midwife of the reform would be the winner of the elections, he placed before the leaders of the new formation a clear dilemma: either Areilza or him. There was no need to answer: Areilza had to withdraw, Suárez remodelled the coalition to suit himself and on 3 May 1977, the same day the UCD was founded, announced his candidacy in the elections. Less than a month and a half later he won. Perhaps Suárez rightly thought that he, not the UCD, had won, that without him the UCD was nothing; but, rightly or wrongly, perhaps he also began to think other things. Perhaps he thought that without him not only would the UCD not exist: the rest of the parties wouldn’t exist either. Perhaps he thought that without him not only would the rest of the parties not exist: democracy wouldn’t exist either. Perhaps he thought that he was his party, that he was the government, that he was democracy, because he was the charismatic leader who had brought forty years of dictatorship to an end in eleven months, peacefully with an unprecedented operation. Perhaps he thought he was going to govern for decades. Perhaps he thought, therefore, that he wasn’t going to govern just with a view to the right and to the centre — where his voters were, the ones who had put him in power — but also with a view to the left: after all, he would think, a true leader does not govern for the few, but for all; after all, he would think, he also needed the left to be able to govern; after all, he would think, deep down he was a Social Democrat, almost a Socialist; after all, he would think, he was no longer a Falangist but he had been one and Falangism and the left shared the same anti-capitalist rhetoric, the same social concern, the same contempt for the tycoons; after all, he would think, he was anything but a tycoon, he’d risen from the ranks in politics and in life, he knew the forsakenness of the street and miserable boarding houses and starvation wages and there was no way he was going to accept being described as a right-wing politician, he belonged to the centre left, increasingly more to the left and less to the centre although the centre and the right voted for him, he was light years away from Fraga and his Francoist pachyderms, to be on the right was to be old in body and spirit, to be against history and against the oppressed, carrying the guilt and the shame of forty years of Francoism, while to be progressive was the fairest, most modern and most audacious thing to be and he always — always: since he ruled his adolescent crew in Ávila and embodied to perfection the ideal youth of the dictatorship — had been the fairest, most modern and most audacious, his Francoist past was at once very far away and too close and humiliated him with its proximity, he was not who he had once been, he was now not only the maker of democracy but also its champion, the main bastion of its defence, he had constructed it with his own hands and he was going to defend it from the military and from the terrorists, from the far right and from the far left, the bankers and the businessmen, politicians and journalists and adventurers, Rome and Washington.
Perhaps that was what Adolfo Suárez felt as the years went by; that or part of it or something very similar to it, a feeling that started to come over him gradually as soon as he was elected Prime Minister in the first democratic elections and from that moment on began to cause him to undergo a radical metamorphosis: the former provincial Falangist, the former Francoist upstart, the Julien Sorel or Lucien Rubempré or Frédéric Moreau of the 1960s ended up investing himself with the dignity of a hero of democracy, Emmanuele Bardone believed himself to be General Della Rovere and the plebeian fascist dreamt of himself converted into a left-wing aristocrat. Like Bardone, he didn’t do it out of haughtiness, because there was no haughtiness in his nature, but because an aesthetic and political instinct surpassed him and pushed him to interpret with a fidelity deeper than reason the role history had assigned him or that he felt it had assigned him. I’ve said over the years, I’ve said gradually: like that of Bardone, Suárez’s mutation was not, it almost goes without saying, an instantaneous epiphany, but a slow, zigzagging process, often secret from everybody or almost everybody, but maybe especially from Suárez himself. Although it would be reasonable to date the origin of it all to the very day the King appointed him Prime Minister and, ennobled by the position, he proposed to act as if he were a prime minister appointed by the citizens, opening himself to the political and moral reason of the democratic opposition, the truth is that his new character didn’t show signs of life until, in order to disassociate himself from the right, shortly before the elections Suárez insisted on conceding a disproportionate weight in the UCD to the small Social Democratic Party in the coalition, and when, just afterwards — while his parliamentary group discussed the possibility that their deputies might occupy the left wing of the chamber in the Cortes, symbolically reserved for the parties of the left — he declared himself a Social Democrat to his former Deputy Prime Minister and announced the formation of a centre-left government. These postures anticipate the drift Suárez experienced during the four years he was still in government. They were years of decline: he was never again the explosive politician he’d been during the first eleven months of his mandate, but until March 1979, when he won his second general election, he was still a bold and efficient politician; from then until 1981 he was a mediocre, sometimes disastrous politician. Three projects monopolized the first period; three collective projects, which Suárez steered but in which the main political parties all took part: the Moncloa Pact, the drawing up of the Constitution and the designing of the so-called Estado de las Autonomías. They weren’t the epic undertakings that had spurred his imagination and multiplied his talent during his first year in the premiership, deeds that demanded juridical con-tricks, magic feints never before seen, false duels against false enemies, secret meetings, life-or-death decisions and stages set for a champion facing danger alone with his squire; they were not these sorts of undertakings, but they were matters of historical magnitude; he did not set upon them with the predatory momentum he’d shown up till then, but at least he did so with the conviction gained by the strength of his triumphs and the authority of the voters; he also did so while little by little General Della Rovere displaced Emmanuele Bardone inside him. Thus, the Moncloa Pact was a largely successful attempt to pacify a society on a war footing since the death rattles of Francoism and convulsed by the devastating consequences of the first oil crisis; but the pact was most of all an agreement between the government and the left and, although signed by all the main political parties, it received harsh criticism from the business sector, from the right and from certain sectors of the UCD, which accused the Prime Minister of having surrendered to the unions and the Communists. Thus as well, the Constitution was a successful attempt to give democracy a lasting legal framework; but Suárez most likely only agreed to draw it up owing to the demands pressed on him by the left, and it is certain that, despite at first doing everything possible to make the text conform to his interests down to the last letter, when he understood that this aspiration was useless and pernicious he endeavoured more than anyone to make sure the result was the work of the accord of all the parties, and not, as all or almost all the previous constitutions had been, a constant cause for discord and eventually a burden for democracy, just as it’s true that in order to achieve it he always sought alliances with the left and not with the right, which produced more resentment in his own party. These two great projects — the first approved in the Cortes in October 1977 and the second approved by a referendum in December 1978 — represented two successes for Suárez (and for democracy); with the third it’s again impossible not to imagine General Della Rovere fighting to supplant Emmanuele Bardone: the difference is that on this occasion Suárez lost his grip on the project and it ended up turning into one of the main causes of the political disorder that led to his leaving power and to the 23 February coup.