Everyone remembers February 23rd, 1981 as the day of the coup d'état in which a group of soldiers commanded by Civil Guard lieutenant colonel Antonio Tejero Molina interrupted the session of the Congress of Deputies which was in the process of investing Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo as Spanish prime minister. We also remember how tanks appeared on the streets of Valencia, where the military head was Jaime Milans del Bosch, and the role played by king Juan Carlos from the Zarzuela royal palace, whose story, as it was told to us, we now know to be false. But over the years, the day after the attempted coup has been forgotten. The transcendental and inward-turning day after. The first session of that Tuesday, more than 42 years ago, had begun with the departure of the parliamentarians from the lower house on Madrid's Carrera de San Jerónimo after a night detained and humiliated by the soldiers of the coup.
Among the 350 deputies, nine could be said to be Catalan nationalists. The eight from Convergència i Unió (CiU) and, on his own, Heribert Barrera, from the Catalan Republican Left (ERC). Well, just after leaving Congress, the president of the parliamentary group known as Catalan Minority (CiU), Miquel Roca, contacted the then-Catalan president Jordi Pujol at the Palau de la Generalitat. From that telephone conversation arose the change in the votes cast by the Catalan nationalist deputies, who went from 'abstention' to 'yes' to the new prime minister in a move which was, as they understood it, an act of responsibility in the face of the risk that democracy seemed to be in, and they announced it immediately.
The response by the state to the gesture of commitment made by Pujol, Roca and company was a call from the head of state in the Zarzuela to the political leaders of the moment: outgoing PM Adolfo Suárez and the deputies and parliamentary leaders Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún ( UCD), Felipe González (PSOE), Santiago Carrillo (PCE) and Manuel Fraga (AP). The Catalan and Basque representatives (the latter, from the PNV) were not even summoned, as it was understood that they were also part of the problem of an autonomous Spain that needed to be brought into line.
This became known months later, when the autonomous community law, the LOAPA, was passed and the door was locked to a model of an autonomous state that could perhaps have been more federalizing, but which the Spanish parties renounced. Today we know that the corrupt monarch moved the strings of the coup and that, therefore, democracy was much less in danger than we were led to believe and it was all a kind of farce to tame a political class. At least, it is clear that the king had not committed himself to lead a military dictatorship directly.
What has been happening these days in Madrid, with a coup clad in judge's robes underway and the acquiescence of the right-wing sectors of politics and the media, and a kind of fear in some cases, and concern in others, that is hovering over the Spanish public, and also the Catalan political class, reminds me a lot of those moments. It is not exactly the same, but it does bear a certain resemblance. At least, this hyper-responsibility from Catalonia to show solidarity with the problems of others, when we are emerging from years in which the independence movement has generally found a level of support or even camaraderie, especially in the most difficult moments, that could only be called scarce to avoid describing it as wafer-thin. All this, in the middle of a complex investiture, and the consequences of the results of the July 23rd election, in which the pro-independence parties have the best cards in the game.
But the saying goes that the winner of the hand is the one who makes the second-to-last mistake. And surely, in these very hours we are at that precise moment when it is a matter of winning the hand well, without giving anything away.