Juan Fernández-Miranda won the Espasa Essay Award with ‘Goal: democracy’, a chronicle written in the present tense about the nineteen months that separate Franco’s death from the first democratic elections. He claims that we have forgotten how difficult it was to convince everyone to take the steps that brought democracy to Spain in such a short time. The author, a political correspondent for ABC, advocates for a “democratic militancy” in favor of the Transition, which was a success and needs the majority who feel this way to no longer remain silent.
-Why this chronicle of the Transition at this time?
-In a year it will be fifty years since Franco’s death. From there we will begin a seven-year period in which we will remember everything that happened at that time. The Political Reform Law, the legalization of the Communist Party, the first elections, the arrival of the left in 1982.
-The Transition has been questioned, especially from the left.
-I believe that those of us who defend the Transition, those of us who believe that it was a successful process, are very silent in the face of those who believe that it was a continuation of the Franco regime and other types of atrocities that they say, and we have to defend Victoria Prego’s story, Charles Powell and Paul Preston.
-Could it also be due to a generational issue?
-Those of us who were already born in democracy need to know the Transition. You can’t love what you don’t know. It is necessary to take an initiative of democratic activism, of democratic militancy, in defense of the Transition. The chronicle of my book is a story of events that reminds us what that dizzying, complex and ultimately successful process was like.
-Why are the defenders silent?
-The Transition was mythologized: it was so successful, so fast, everything went so well, it does not mean that everything was perfect, that in 19 months Spain was voting, in 36 it had a Constitution and in seven years it had a left-wing government with 202 deputies. Spain had done the best thing in history and it mythologized itself and refused to continue explaining it.
-Is it only the left that challenges the Transition?
-The anti-transition discourse is forged on the extreme left, and somewhat residual on the very extreme right. However, all the immense space in the center assumes that it was successful. And the new generations in the end are only listening to the negative discourse. It is necessary to claim all the difficult things that went right, but it is also very necessary to detect and accept some things that went wrong.
-Which ones would you highlight?
-We had to develop some things legislatively, we had to continue making the country and maybe there we fell asleep a little. If the Transition has any weak point, it is the autonomous issue. It didn’t close properly. The State of Autonomies has been largely a success, but perhaps due to disloyalties that the constituents did not take into account, the territorial problem has not been fully resolved. In the end it has exploded. Perhaps one of the things that we do not remember is the dizzying feeling of those who were in the last steps of a dictatorship and dreamed and wanted to reach a democracy, but they had to invent that path.
-How does the book portray that?
-The chronicle style in the present gives a lot of strength to the story, the reader feels in the situation. The King is alone on November 21, 1975, when Franco dies, and the reader understands it. Just as lonely as when he has difficulty naming the two essential people: Torcuato Fernández de Miranda first, Adolfo Suárez later, and he begins to incorporate the left, to stop the hard right, the Franco bunker, those who wanted everything stay the same. I believe that the story of events makes it easy for the reader to understand the dizzying nature of the process and the enormous risks.
-There were dramatic moments…
-When the tragic week of January 1976, with the Atocha attacks and some others, or the murder of José María Araluce, member of the Kingdom Council, at the door of his house. There are so many difficult moments, or the King’s attempts to convince Giscard d’Estaing to come to Spain to support him, and the Frenchman says it won’t last even four months, or the conversations with the US, or the attempt to get Ceaucescu influenced Carrillo so that the left would join, well, all that is happening.
-In those nineteen months freedom begins to walk.
-When the people vote, the representatives chosen by the people decide where Spain, democracy, is going.
-We have lost the ability to understand that the other can disagree and, nevertheless, we must listen to them. Ignatieff said it in Oviedo on Friday.
-It is one of the most serious problems in current Spanish politics. Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo told me a while ago that if today we put the entire parliamentary arc in a room, and lock it, and say: “Until you reach an agreement on the territorial model, you will not leave,” what would come out It would be the Constitution, the State of the Autonomies. We have lost the ability to respect the opposite and that is the democratic militancy to which I appeal.
-Today it is difficult to claim the Transition without thinking about the recent image of King Juan Carlos.
-The King in 1975 is a statesman. Now we criticize him a lot, and rightly so, for everything we have learned about his frivolities in matters of love and pecuniary matters, and it should be so, from a critical spirit, but King Juan Carlos, with his reputation for being folksy, has buried his statesman image. He was capable of attracting great international leaders to Spain, of stopping the bunker, the army, of understanding with the church, which was very good, by the way, in the Transition. I believe there is a story to be developed of the statesman King.
-What is your favorite moment?
-When Torcuato Fernández Miranda convinced the courts to close the Franco regime and call elections, and when Adolfo Suárez legalized the PC, which is probably the greatest political audacity of the last half century in Spain.
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