But he didn’t just abandon his successor; he also abandoned his party. On his return from the holiday, Suárez set up a legal office with a handful of faithful from his cabinet, and for some time he made an effort to stay away from politics; the political village of Madrid facilitated his efforts: the calamity of the final months of his government and the trauma of his resignation and 23 February had made him just short of undesirable, and anybody who harboured the slightest ambition — and almost everybody who harboured none — endeavoured to keep him at a distance. His vocation, however, was much stronger than his insolvency and, in spite of the promise he’d made to the King, that period out of politics was brief and his distancing from power relative; after all he still maintained a certain control of UCD through some of his men, which didn’t prevent the Party from continuing to unhinge itself or him from watching this unhinging with a disgust mixed with vindictive rage: contrary to what so many of his fellow Party members had been predicting for a long time, it proved that his leadership had not been the cause of all the UCD’s woes; with his successor, on the other hand, the disgust was not mixed: as soon as he became Prime Minister Calvo Sotelo began to adopt measures that would root out Suárez’s policies and which he interpreted as an intolerable swing to the right. As a result of all this, within a few months of his retirement from politics Suárez began to prepare his return. By then Calvo Sotelo had removed Suárez’s supporters from the leadership of the UCD and he was feeling increasingly ill at ease in a party that rightly blamed him for its fall, so, although there were offers made for him to retake the wheel of the UCD to keep it from crashing, Suárez turned them down, and in the last days of June 1982, just three months before the general election, he announced the creation of a new party: the Centro Democrático y Social (CDS, Democratic and Social Centre).
It was his last political adventure. It was guided by a double purpose: on the one hand, to create a real party, organizationally and ideologically cohesive, as the UCD had never been; on the other hand, to promote his new principles of a progressive statesman of concord, his new political ethic of a left or centre-left aristocrat. He set up the party with hardly any resources, hardly any men, without anyone’s backing or hardly anyone’s, and less than none of the so-called powers that be, who had done everything they could to throw him out of power and contemplated the possibility of his return with horror. Far from disheartened, he was excited by this abandonment, maybe because he felt that it returned to politics an epic and aesthetic spirit that he hadn’t felt since his first months in government and had almost forgotten, authorizing him as well to present himself as a victim of the powerful and as a solitary fighter against injustice and adversity or, as he told the journalists at the presentation of the new party, as a Quixote coming out lance at the ready to take on all comers in the wind and the weather out on the road. Around that time a story was widely circulated that many consider apocryphal. The story goes that shortly before the election one of his collaborators recommended he hire an American adviser for the campaign; Suárez accepted the suggestion. Do you want to win the election? was the question the adviser asked Suárez straight away when they met. Naturally, Suárez said yes. Then let me use the film of the coup d’état, said the adviser. Show the people the empty chamber and you sitting on your bench and you’ll get an absolute majority. Suárez burst out laughing, thanked the adviser and dismissed him then and there. The anecdote resembles a vignette invented by one of Suárez’s hagiographers — to use the most devastating images of the democracy in an electoral campaign was not doing any favours to democracy, and the great man chose to wage a clean fight even at the cost of losing the election — I don’t know whether it is or not, but, if it’s true that some adviser made such a proposal to Suárez, I would bet that was his reaction: first, because he knew the adviser was mistaken and, although the image of the chamber on the evening of 23 February could have won him thousands of votes, it would never have won the election for him; and second — and especially — because, even supposing that the electoral use of those images would have won him the election, it would have ruined irredeemably the role he needed to play in order to definitively exorcize his past and fix his place in history; or to put it another way: perhaps Emmanuele Bardone would have accepted the adviser’s suggestions, but not General Della Rovere, and Suárez didn’t want anything to do with Emmanuele Bardone anymore and hadn’t for a long time.
In that election he won two seats. It was a very poor result, not even enough to form his own parliamentary group in the Cortes, and relegated him to the benches reserved for the mixed group beside his eternal buddy Santiago Carrillo, who by then was prolonging his agony at the head of the PCE and never tired of laughingly repeating to him that this was how the country was paying them back for their gesture of keeping their composure on the evening of 23 February; but it was also enough of a result to allow him to play the left-wing or centre-left aristocrat and statesman of concord. He began to do so at the first opportunity: during the session of investiture for the new Prime Minister he cast his vote for Felipe González, who had been his fiercest adversary while he led the government and who didn’t even thank him for the support, undoubtedly because the absolute majority obtained by the PSOE in the elections made it superfluous. ‘We mustn’t contribute to disillusion,’ Suárez said that day from the speakers’ rostrum in the Cortes. ‘We shall not cheer this government’s possible errors. We shall not participate, neither in this chamber nor outside of it, in destabilizing operations against the government. We are not supporters of the irresponsible and dangerous game of capitalizing on the difficulties of those who hold the honourable charge of governing Spain.’ These words were met with the sonorous indifference or silent disdain of an almost empty chamber, but contained a declaration of principles and a lesson in political ethics that over the next four years he did not tire of imparting: he was not prepared to do to others what they’d done to him at the price of provoking a crisis of state like the one that had led to his resignation and to 23 February. It was a retroactive form of defence and, although nobody recognized his authority to give anybody lessons in political ethics, Suárez continued doggedly preaching his new gospel. The truth is he abided by it, in part because his parliamentary insignificance permitted it, but above all because he wanted more than anything else to be true to the idiosyncrasies of his new character. That’s how he began to forge his resurrection: little by little people began to bury the disoriented politician of the last years of his mandate and dig up the vibrant maker of democracy, and little by little, and especially as some grew disappointed with the Socialist illusion, his statesman’s gestures and rhetoric, his ethical regenerationism began to catch on and a confusing progressive discourse that allowed him to flirt with the intellectual left in the capitals, to which he always wanted to belong, as well as recover part of his attraction for the traditional right of the provinces, to which he always had belonged.