The strange case of the candidate Tamames

The first time

rose to fame was when, when El País was launched in May 1976, after the death of the dictator

,

newspaper recalled that Tamames, an important economist, was one of the founding team of the new newspaper. who became the most celebrated Spanish professor.

He was then in prison for being a communist while

, an intrepid follower of the recently deceased, was also part of the same board.

Some time later, Tamames changed address and jacket several times.

Dressed in green colors like an old rocker, he received the proposal from the extreme right of

and has just given himself a good political and personal bump in his aspiration to be (and appear to be) a candidate to remove President Pedro Sánchez from office, "the worst president of democracy” (of democracy and beyond, the leaders of Vox have come to say).

Let's recount the strange case of the failed candidate.

The person who wrote that chronicle about the imprisonment of the communist Tamames was

, correspondent in Madrid for the British conservative newspaper, one of the most famous journalists dedicated to telling how an era was dying and another was beginning, in which a citizen like him was expected to imprisoned did not purge prison for his ideas or that someone like that thunderous Francoist, Fraga, was persecuted for having belonged to the front row of the dictatorship.

Professor Ramón Tamames (i) and the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal (c), during the second and last day of the debate on the motion of no confidence against the Government of Pedro Sánchez, Photo Reuters

Fraga's penultimate works for Franco were those he carried out as Spanish ambassador to Great Britain and, more recently, as architect of a succession that only touched him.

In London he actively conspired, and in public (this journalist was a witness), so that he would be the principal of a triumvirate that dissolved like slogans in the rain.

He conspired, above all, so that

, the one who publicly mourned the death of his boss, would not be president of the Government.

Arias was chosen by

, successor "as King" of the recently dead king, to pretend that there was continuity in the very long history marked by Franco since he won the civil war.

Until don Juan Carlos told another British journalist, in

, that that crybaby was a

.

And the brief aegis of that unmitigated disaster is over.

Don Juan Carlos decided to end (little by little) what was left of the past, although (also to Suárez's surprise) the successor of the successor was a former Falangist,

, converted into the one who dared, in the immediate Holy Week, to legalize Tamames, for example, and therefore the Communist Party of Santiago Carrillo, who had entered clandestinely, with false hair, through the then already neglected border of the Pyrenees .

Today those who recruited the former prisoner for being part of that then-illegal party once again refer to the communists as the enemies of the Spanish Nation whose past they actively yearn for.

The ex-communist as a Trojan horse of the biggest anti-communist diatribe since the triumph of Franco's civil war.

Tamames did not allow agreement with this reiterated and reactionary statement to be inferred from his words, but with this silence he contributed to allowing his former party comrades to appear again, too, as the bad guys in a movie that does not look like, really, nor to the diminished reality of communism in Spain or to the true situation of a country whose democracy is distinguished by everything except the Eurocommunist embers that it wanted to give it, above Carrillo himself,

Everything has been very painful because nothing (neither Tamames nor Vox) was what it seemed in this motion of censure that did not manage to move a hair (or the chair) to the current president of the Government, who has come out very reinforced from the fair

Painful, in the first place, for Tamames, who hoped that the sensation given by his captors about his example of an impeccable democrat would remain intact (in reality he got off several horses, knocked down those who represented the municipal left, passed through the center right and , downhill, or up, on the road, he reached the unequivocal present as a man of the right now, that's life, fully touched by the extreme right that led him to take a happy picture with his captors at the end of this resounding failure) .

Those nostalgic for Franco, and for what he supposed, wanted to dilute that heavy and ultra belonging with an ancient communist.

Franco was resurrected for a while, not only because this was the real yearning of those who do not want the freedoms found by the Spain of the Transition, but because once again it was known that such an exaggerated management of his memory has done is revive what they supposed, against public liberties, many of which have now, to the chagrin of Vox, been inaugurated or restored.

Until Franco's last breath, he had been presented by Arias Navarro as an exemplary father who continued to work until dawn under "the little light of El Pardo" for the cleanliness of the Homeland.

There lived, dying, and commanding, and killing, that hero of fascism that in Spain was called Francoism, before the implacable agony (also that of those who would celebrate his death) ended on November 20, 1975. Nostalgic for that period they have continued, under other names, actively longing for the predecessor of the Monarchy.

One of those names is of recent creation.

It is this Vox that claimed Tamames to make him his leader for two days.

Vox's ambition is the same as those of the old patriots, they demand their

, as if the country were theirs, it shames the autonomies whose language is not only Spanish, it feeds the idea that this country is worse than when it governed it the Caudillo del Pardo, and he trusted that Tamames, being another for many years, would serve to explain why this country is the disaster that draws this extreme right.

And although the designated candidate got tired of saying that he had not been a communist for years, the mantra of the past tried to convey the idea that that something that he had left on the left was going to help clean up the imposing feeling that Vox is really what it was. seems.

It took, it is taking, then, years for the embers of the dictatorship to cease.

In the first years without Franco there was violence and death, the extreme right honored the dictator by killing, the ultra attacks and the counterparts of Eta, which began a long period of equally deadly attacks, did not prevent a transition that sought peace with the help of the communists who rescued Santiago Carrillo.

This one, in case there was any doubt, embraced the Spanish flag, without the additions of the dictatorship.

But in a landmark photo, celebrating the legalization of the communists, the one who hoisted the banner of the PCE was precisely the one now presented as a candidate by the anti-communists.

After the terrible hesitations that gave way to the decline of Francoism, the communists rebuilt their spirits and teams.

Carrillo agreed with the parties to the right of communism (the PSOE, which supported the leadership of

, and the successive names of the right-wing political group that the former ambassador would lead in London) a new stage of agreements that ended up being called La Transición.

Neither in the course of this, which seemed like a miracle of reconciliation between winners and losers, nor until now, when neither the ultra-right of Vox nor the left of Pablo Iglesias, accept that clean slate as their own, has that period been alleviated entirely.

A coup, in 1981, was a warning that the Francoist military had not fallen asleep, and alerted the population, who took to the streets as if to put out the little light of El Pardo for good, they found a warning there.

The apocalypse proclaimed now, by the right and the extreme right, is slow in coming, but it is proclaimed every day, by the ultra part of politics, like the bells of John Donne.

Now Pardo's little light came on and went out almost immediately.

Tamames say feel happy from the experience.

Surrounded by his loved ones who are not entirely his, but who have done their best to make him appear and he accepted that closeness, he posed in a sad photograph (of sad defeat) that is going to haunt him for the rest of his life. .

In that photo he is with all his promoters celebrating, celebrating, with cheers to Spain as if it had won a game.

His cry was somewhere between egocentric and skeptical.

Tamames limited himself to brandishing his cane, the staff of old age, and shouting a description that also seemed ironic: "Long live the Motion!"

look too

To ventilate the smell of the dictatorship

The Kallifatides case