The declassification of the February 23rd documents confirms what we already suspected at the time: that Tejero's rashness, the impetuous coup plotter, was a stroke of luck. He raised the curtain prematurely, indignant at the indecisiveness of his fellow conspirators. Too many would-be dictators. Only Milans del Bosch followed suit, leaving the others in a strange limbo that had the effect of dissolving alliances and generating a certain disarray among those who had long been mobilizing and pressuring for a hardening of the regime: they were seeking a drawing-room coup, with the king as a Spaniard, and instead found themselves facing an onslaught. And so, the situation suddenly changed.
In the documents, there are traces of these thwarted movements, which faded away amidst a spectacle that ended in a dead end. The institutions responded, and the day after the failed coup, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, whom no one ever remembers, was elected president of the government. However, it left the country in the necessary conditions so that, a year and a half later, a party with a republican tradition, the PSOE, could win an election with an absolute majority, thus completing the transition cycle and entering the phase of consolidating a democracy based on an imperfect two-party system.
The PSOE and PP established their hegemony, and, like any regime, Spain created its defenses, limits, and perversions, which are now being exposed at a time when the right wing—as throughout Europe—is shamelessly shifting toward authoritarianism. Vox, the PP, and Junts are already sharing votes to dismantle some of the social reforms of the Sánchez government.
The coup attempt, thankfully, failed, and the conspiracy movements, which came from a sufficiently broad range, fortunately got bogged down in personal ambitions and indecisiveness. But the uncertainties of the present require vigilance. Suddenly, Feijóo is calling for the return of Juan Carlos I to Spain. Cynicism or ignorance? Feijóo should know that the emeritus king is not out of Spain because of the 23-F coup attempt, but because of the abuses and negligence committed while in office—between financial hardship and insolence—which forced him to abdicate in favor of his son, because he was endangering the monarchy itself. No one has forbidden him from returning, but if he does, he must pay the price. Exercises in sowing confusion, like Feijóo's, should be considered a warning at this time of destabilization of Europe by the extreme right: the 23-F coup attempt happened, but the reactionary right is more emboldened than ever. And the People's Party (PP) chooses to follow suit because it doesn't want to fight them, or doesn't know how.
