Felipe González, the man who changed Spain without being able to prevent politics from changing him

The 1977 elections confirmed the predictions made by Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra, but not all of them. The PSOE would be the great force of the left far above the PCE, despite the fact that the communists had monopolized decades of anti-Franco struggle. However, the Socialists were left with 118 seats, far from the 165 of Adolfo Suárez’s UCD. González took some time to reflect, because he was already thinking about retiring from politics. He traveled to Panama, where he met one of the legendary figures of Latin American politics at the time, Omar Torrijos, who had seized power in a coup in 1968.

Torrijos was a somewhat ambivalent dictator. His progressive ideas did not prevent him from being clear that the country would prosper at the rate he set, and not one step further. Someone used to giving lessons. He gave one to González: “I’m going to tell you something you shouldn’t forget: never get upset. If you get upset, they loosen you up. Don’t let them see you weak, don’t hesitate, don’t tremble. Remember it, Felipe: if you get upset, they loosen you up”.

It is a dialogue reconstructed by the journalist Sergio del Molino in his book ‘Un tal González’, an attempt to present the former Prime Minister as the providential man who made possible the modernization of Spain after decades of dictatorship and a Transition pregnant with dramatic moments . Torrijos’s advice fits with the subsequent trajectory of the man who was only 35 years old at the time.

He did his best so that no one saw him weak or cornered. The exercise of power demanded it and granted it that armor. Inside, it was another story. There were several occasions when he was tempted to drop everything and then change his mind or let others convince him that it was essential. They were quite successful, because he was Prime Minister for fourteen years and leader of the PSOE for twenty-three. Whether it was an admission of his vulnerability, that he wanted another life, or just a fiction fueled by the demands of the ego is something only he knows.

‘Un tal González’ is what we could call an intelligent hagiography in which the dark points of the character are not ignored, although they are contextualized so that they do the least possible damage. Even so, compliments are not inventions produced by an irresistible attraction. Denying the relevance in Spanish politics of the labor lawyer born in Seville in 1942 is as absurd as it is useless.

It is legitimate to wonder if Spain’s return to democracy would have been different with another person in charge, but it would be another PSOE and another Felipe González, and perhaps another Spain. The first step to analyze reality is to know it.

The author has argued that the book is not an essay or a biography. He maintains that it is a novel fueled by real events, perhaps to have more freedom by putting on the page dialogues that may not have been literal, but were truthful. It is not something that damages the book, but it is strange. It is a journalistic chronicle deeply rooted in reality in which Del Molino uses the first person sparingly. Calling it a novel is a bit extravagant.

Del Molino’s vindictive spirit in defending the years of González’s government is evident. He even believes that contesting the value of that political task is a symptom of frivolity, a failed way of situating himself in an eternal adolescence that seeks to achieve what was not possible in the Spain of those years.

Let Spain work, González said when everyone called him Felipe and a journalist wanted to know what the 1982 socialist slogan ‘For Change’ consisted of. It didn’t sound spectacular. Neither the slogan nor the answer. The truth is that it was not irrelevant, because there was no state at that time that was useful to build a democracy or the one that existed was only used to get by, not to defend the social rights of the people. Only in a revolution does one start from scratch, and there was no revolution or what was called a rupture.

For this reason, an important part of the left reached the conclusion years later that the outcome had not been satisfactory for their ideas. It is a criticism that irritates the author of the book and many others, but it is inevitable once the decades have passed in which politicians and the media drew and imposed an idealized version of the Transition that over time – and here we must include the conduct of King Juan Carlos – has been questioned.

González preferred to build a State in which there was public health and education, in which social rights and daily life were closer to those existing in Western Europe. A country whose citizens were not ashamed.

“The candidate nailed the message that some Spaniards wanted to hear, fed up with nothing working, self-conscious about an endemic backwardness and disenchanted with a democracy that did not finish noticing in daily life,” writes Del Molino. He was already beginning to talk about disenchantment. The economic recovery throughout the 1980s served to ward off some of that sentiment. A democratic system is irreparably damaged when its economic legitimacy is debatable or non-existent.

Pragmatism is one of the characteristics that stands out most about González. The turn on NATO is a recurring example. The influence of the idea that Deng Xiapoing had told him – “white cat or black cat, it doesn’t matter; the important thing is that it catches mice” –, too. Its 1982 ministers have recalled that the first government was obliged to “manage the contradictions” that came from the contrast between the promises made to come to power and reality. In this dilemma, reality often wins out.

Some who worked with him limit the scope of that pragmatism. “He has always been inflexible in the strategy, in the medium and long-term objectives. I have never seen him make the slightest concession, neither within the Government nor outside”, said Ignacio Varela, author of the book ‘For Change, 1972- 1982: How Felipe González refounded the PSOE and brought it to power’ and deputy director of the Presidency cabinet in Moncloa for eleven years.

Del Molino highlights the phrases with which the leader of the PSOE announced in 1997 the end of his political career. “The key consisted in not vindicating the past, in concentrating efforts on vindicating the future. It consisted in not being trapped, once again, in the labyrinth of a history that we did not do well in the 19th century and a good part of the 20th” González recalled before a stunned public upon hearing the news of his retirement.

Not being a hostage to the past is an idea that has many advantages. Ignore it, not so much. The latter is what made it possible for the equestrian statue of Franco to not be removed from the Nuevos Ministerios area in Madrid until 2005. The concept of historical memory was alien to González’s idea of ​​Spain, at least as far as to government responsibilities. Since it could endanger other things, there was no problem in letting time heal that wound, something that almost never happens.

Economic progress had a gloomy reverse that was that of corruption. The scandals followed one another as if the rats that had fattened up inside the ship in the absence of controls by its captains emerged. Some of those thieves (Luis Roldán or Mariano Rubio) were people to whom González had granted the utmost confidence. He put them there and he defended them until the facts exposed him.

“Faced with such a bombardment,” writes Del Molino, “the president kept silent or said that he did not know anything and that he was the first to be surprised. He was not aware of the robberies. He was very disconcerted that there was so much loose hood. made too big and scattered to control.

He did not even appeal to fatalism to respond to the sentences for the case of the GAL. With an aggravation. When José Barrionuevo and Rafael Vera had to go to prison for their responsibility in the kidnapping of Segundo Marey, one of the actions of the terrorist group created within the State, González went to see them off at the gates of the Guadalajara prison as if they were heroes. Along with the entire leadership of the PSOE.

They had been sentenced to ten years by the Supreme Court for the crimes of kidnapping and embezzlement of public funds. They only spent three months behind bars thanks to a partial pardon granted by the Government of José María Aznar.

Sergio del Molino writes that this gesture “has incurably damaged his heritage.” It’s the bad thing about politicians who change the history of their country. The story also ends up changing them. It is something that not even the author of such a laudatory book on the figure of González can deny.

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