24/03/2014
Member of FAES Board of Trustees.
Academician of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences
When on July 3, 1976, King Juan Carlos I chose Adolfo Suárez as Prime Minister of Spain amongst the three candidates submitted by the Privy Council, few people knew his name. Many more were those who did not trust the future of their country under his mandate once they got to know his political career. This man came from the last generations of the National Movement –in which he had become Minister/Secretary General in Arias Navarro's Government after Franco's death–, and while it is true that as a rapporteur of the Political Reform Act he had acquired some reformist notoriety, his origins and past career clearly placed him in the orbit of the declining Falange.
But once installed in the Moncloa he promptly implemented what had actually been his main motto –without many noticing it– in the early post-Franco days: "Make Normal in political life what's already normal on the street" . That is, the desire for freedom, the recognition of plurality, the establishment of tolerance, the acceptance of diversity. Under the sovereign boost –because behind him was the King, and his determination to drive Spain's change to democracy–, Adolfo Suarez will remain the essential reference to explain the return to freedom after four decades of dictatorship.
In a country traditionally torn by fratricidal quarrels, he was able to introduce the practise of dialogue, the habit of communication and the practise of careful listening. He showed patience, persuasiveness, willingness to negotiate and empathy for all and sundry. Endowed with a singular personal appeal, he filled the most difficult years of our recent history with hope and the possibility of a future, without ever hiding from public knowledge the multiple difficulties that always surrounded the performance of his mission. And proof of this were the events that led to his resignation in January 1981 and the coup d'état a month later. Twilight riots in what would become a consolidated reality: the democratic Spain of the 1978 Constitution. To which Suarez's name is inextricably linked.
In these times of iconoclasm, in which politics is, and not without reason, denigrated by the sad execution of those who practise it professionally, someone somewhere should erect a simple statue in memory of Adolfo Suárez with these few words: "Your grateful homeland". Few like him deserve it.