ABSTRACT
The immediate reaction of the press and the political élite to the departure of Suárez was one of surprise. After long months of growing hostility to the President, it was difficult to believe that he had actually gone. There were a few complacent comments that for him to be replaced at all was evidence of the strength of Spanish democracy. Neither politicians nor journalists realized how severely that strength was soon to be tested. It was widely whispered in Madrid that Suárez had had advance notice of a forthcoming military action against him. At the very least, he was aware that General Armada was meeting politicians with a view to launching what came to be known as his golpe blando (soft coup). Only two days after Suárez’s resignation, the right-wing columnist Emilio Romero, a close friend of García Carrés, published an article in ABC which discussed the ‘solution Armada’ (a pun on armed solution and Armada solution). Suárez cannot have been ignorant of the fact that some colonels were said to be preparing a more brutal Turkishstyle coup. The long-smouldering army hostility reached new intensity, especially in units of the DAC, after news that Suárez had been trying to calm the Basque Country with pardons for some ETA prisoners. On 24 January, El Alcázar had published sinister ruminations to the effect that another Galaxia-style plot was on the horizon.1 Whatever the case, Suárez had every reason to fear something of the sort. If he hoped to forestall it by disappearing from the scene, he was to be disappointed. Indeed, his resignation was to set off a train of political disintegration which merely consolidated the views of many officers that their intervention was a patriotic duty.
