Like a time traveler, Juan Fernández-Miranda has sneaked into all those offices of the Transition where Spain was risking the future to bring to the present what only a few protagonists were able to experience. And he has written it, of course, because above all he is a journalist. He titled it ‘Objective: Democracy‘ and has earned him the Espasa Essay award. Yesterday, in the ABC Culture Classroom, he presented it to society in a massive event at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. “‘Objective:Democracy’ talks about years that we thought we knew very well but that either we didn’t remember or we didn’t want to remember,” according to Carlos Aganzo, director of the Vocento Foundation, during the talk they had.
«On November 21, 1975, one day after Franco’s death, DonJuan Carlos was alone. “I was going to inherit Franco’s power, but I was alone,” began Fernández-Miranda, deputy to the director of ABC, in a story that was fast-paced and in which he barely left room for questions. Because what the essay portrays (which is actually a chronicle) and what was relived yesterday were the intense years that went from the death of the dictator to the democratic elections of 1977. An “exciting process” full of dark, complex, charged moments of tension, a tangle of dates, moments and versions that Juan Fernández-Miranda manages to unravel in a didactic, thorough and, in the end, entertaining way.
“The Transition was not all improvisation, as some say, there was a script,” explained the journalist. «And there was, above all and first, a head of state who was clear about where to go. King Juan Carlos, in his best version, that version that must be vindicated, put Spain on a path towards a destiny called liberal democracy, called parliamentary monarchy. The King did very well in surrounding himself with very well-prepared, diverse people, of all the colors, but they knew that the only destiny was that democracy. “The King knew how to surround himself with people better than him,” says Fernández-Miranda, who remembers that at the time concord was “the fundamental value,” and that is why on Adolfo Suárez’s tomb you can still read ‘Concord was possible.’ ‘.
Fernández-Miranda goes deeper into the metaphor of the destination station: «If the King is the one who marks the end station, the one who builds the tracks and the locomotive is Torcuato Fernández-Miranda. And Suárez, if I may use the metaphor even more, was the machinist. Suárez, with his impressive charisma and capacity for seduction, and impressive courage and audacity, won over the political class and the citizens. That virtuous triangle was what allowed everything to work. And it was successful, but that everything worked was a miracle,” he concluded.
The journalist valued the figure of Don Juan Carlos. «The King traveled to the United States and gave that statesman’s speech about democracy in the cradle of democracy. He won over the world. Because at that moment, the King did his job, which was a kind of head of state and president of the government. “He led that entire movement in a very committed way,” he said. “We must defend his legacy, he was the most important politician of the last half century in Spain, who knew how to attract everyone to the center, the political class and the citizens. Because the Transition was made by people, and they must be vindicated.”
Thus, with ‘Objective: Democracy’, Juan Fernández-Miranda culminates his approach to the founding moments of modern Spain: ‘The Screenwriter of the Transition’ (2015); ‘Don Juan versus Franco’ (2018) with Jesús García Calero, and in collaboration with Javier Chicote he also published ‘El Jefe de los Spies’ in 2021.
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