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It was not the time of the easy tweet or of the great fights in the general headquarters of the parties for corseted debates, but those of the vans with borrowed loudspeakers wallpapered with posters with the fist and the rose or the raffles of the last Seat and of televisions in color. Spain had just emerged from 40 years of darkness under Franco’s dictatorship and democracy was taking its first steps. A PSOE that until recently functioned from underground then aspired to govern and experienced an unprecedented and unrepeatable mobilization, according to some people who lived through that campaign that brought Felipe González to Moncloa with an absolute majority of a historic result: 202 deputies in The congress.
“I experienced it with my friends. We all got together in a house at night to celebrate it. It was an explosion of joy,” says Isabel about the election night of October 28, 1982. She remembers that many of the people with whom she spent that day, and to which it has been losing track, they voted in the previous elections for a Valencianist formation, but that day they introduced the PSOE ballot. “October 1982 gathers an enormous aspiration for change, not only from our voters, we must not deceive ourselves, there were other voters on the left who were also for change and also on the center-right,” González himself recently acknowledged.
“I skipped the voting discipline, because I was a member of the PCE, but I voted for Felipe,” recalls Elisa Pizarro, who resigned under Julio Anguita and joined the PSOE the day José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero announced the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. She is now retired, she has assumed organic responsibilities in the Madrid group of Moncloa-Aravaca and recognizes herself far from the “drift” of the first socialist president.
Another relevant event for affiliation in the PSOE was the attempted coup in 1981. “My mother joined the next day and I, a few months later,” recalls Patricia Barbadillo, a grassroots militant ever since. “It was the campaign in which I put up the most posters, and with fear, because those from Fuerza Nueva were beating up and the comrades were doing surveillance on the corners just in case,” recalls this teacher, who was in her twenties at the time and participated selling sandwiches at the campaign closing rally held in Ciudad Universitaria.
That act brought together half a million people and was the largest in history, although that campaign, under the slogan ‘For Change’, set such a high bar that it has practically never been surpassed.
This is how Antonio Ramírez Moyano recalls the visit that the then general secretary of the PSOE made to Nueva Carteya (Córdoba) in 1981, shortly before the campaign officially began: “If the town has 6,000 inhabitants, there could be about 2,000 on the street. It hasn’t happened again because there have been more normal campaigns, but then Spain wanted a radical change”.
He was 26 years old and was Secretary of Organization of the municipal PSOE, where he had landed from the Popular Socialist Party. In those years, the PSOE was restructuring the local groups. “We were focused on the campaign. It was crazy,” explains Ramírez Moyano, who soon after took over the town’s baton for eight years and later became a provincial deputy for a legislature.
“All the people who were working moved from town to town. Everything was based on will, putting our own cars, but at that time it was absolutely exciting,” he adds in a telephone conversation today from the grassroots militancy.
One of the people who has in his mind those ‘tuned’ cars with megaphones provided by the party is Ion Antolín. He was only five years old then. “My father, who was a pure grassroots affiliate, was driving and I was in the seat next to me and I was singing the names of those who participated in the rally that afternoon: Alberto Acitores and Juan Ramón Lagunilla,” explains Antolín, who years Later he was a member of the Socialist Youth and, although he always sympathized with the party, he has not had a card. A few months ago he joined the Secretary of State for Communication and now has his office in Ferraz as director of communication.
That campaign had a high turnout is verified by Carmela Pascual, who collaborated in the organization from the socialist headquarters. She then worked in the parliamentary group in Congress, where she began as a volunteer after the 1977 elections: “Then there were no structures or anything, I had my job as an executive secretary in a Belgian company and I was going to collaborate. Then it was structured and I stayed working.”
“What we did was coordinate all the federations of the party,” he says about the work they did from the headquarters that were then on the old Joaquín Morata street: “In general, there weren’t many problems because there was a lot of euphoria in ’82. In In 1979 we had some expectations that were not fulfilled, but after what had happened in 1981 with the coup d’état, we had high expectations of being able to govern. Everything was going pretty smoothly.”
“It was the campaign in which there were more participants from the party and supporters. They wanted to collaborate in the desire to win and for there to be a change,” adds Pascual, who gives as an example the so-called “order services” that were in charge of ensuring for the safety and smooth running of the acts and that today have become professional.After the electoral victory, Pascual went to work with the Minister of Justice, Fernando Ledesma, and later returned to Congress with the PSOE and later to the Senate, where he retired a few years ago.
One of the people who collaborated in the security services, who prefers not to be identified, points out as the main change that then “there was more road”. “Now everyone can take a plane, but before the effort was greater. In the past, we colleagues used to take our cars and now they put on the games. Now those of us who work have a salary and before, not”, explains he, who after the campaign was hired at Ferraz. “Currently they don’t do as many kilometers as then. He did a lot of kilometers by car and went on a bus that he shared with the press and people from the party,” he says about Felipe González. “The campaigns before were more artisanal, now everything is very programmed”, states this worker, who will be part of the PSOE’s device in the act of the 40th anniversary of the victory in Seville, where he has the most emotional memories of that moment, when approached the party with 23 years.
For Miguel Ángel Martínez, the work was already advanced when the campaign of 1982 arrived. “In the previous six years I had not stopped touring the province from top to bottom. It was not a new thing nor was it discovered by many in those towns”, explains Martínez, who was asked by Txiki Benegas, Alfonso Guerra and Carmen García Bloise to lead the candidacy for Cuenca in 1977 after years in exile, from where he maintained important political and trade union activity. He repeated in 1982 and in successive generals until 1999, when he undertook the adventure in the European Parliament, where he was a deputy until 2014.
“I don’t remember that the years when Felipe headed the party were band and sound. It has always been our party of normal people from towns and cities,” says Martínez, who at 82 continues to have a lengthy national agenda, with weekly visits to places in the province and participation in the assemblies of the PSOE, as an international hand in hand with the association of former European parliamentarians.
Martínez believes that the success of the campaign, at least in Castilla-La Mancha, was to convey the message that they were not “willing to be less than the others.” He also theorizes about the “suicide of the right” at the time. “They were convinced that they were going to keep the cake. What made them lose the elections was the contempt for those who were not like them,” adds Martínez, who precisely this October 28 will participate in the inauguration of a museum about his career at the Alcázar de San Juan station.
In any case, he stresses that Felipe González “was not alone” when he achieved the most comfortable absolute majority in history. “There were many other people. Alfonso was [Guerra, que por ahora no ha tenido ninguna participación en las celebraciones que ha organizado Ferraz]who was capable of creating illusions, and people like Carmen García Bloise [en aquel momento secretaria de Organización], who had an important mobilization condition”. “I have not considered myself a felipista. He was neither a felipista nor a war fighter. I was a socialist,” says Ramírez Moyano. “The figure of Felipe is essential in the history of democracy and I hope that when this is calmer he will be recognized for the great work he did,” adds the former mayor, who acknowledges that he was against , for example, of Spain’s entry into NATO, although over time it has ended up agreeing with the former president.
“The important thing is what was done afterwards,” agrees Consuelo Ramiro, who was asked, to her surprise, by some people she knew to be on the PSOE list for the municipality of Socuéllamos (Ciudad Real). “I am a socialist because my parents were,” explains Ramiro, whose “left-wing republican” father was repressed during the dictatorship. She was a councilor for three legislatures and occupied the Social Welfare area in a consistory led by the PCE.
“The change was such that so many women left the work of a housewife and launched into politics,” says Ramiro, who, like many others, was the only woman in a male world. “17 men and me alone. I saw that they listened to me and what I said for the people was well said,” she says proudly before recounting some actions that she maintains were “very important for the rural world,” such as helping people with disabilities who until then were “locked up inside their houses”. “Before Felipe González we were submissive women,” she concludes, about her own experience.
