Bunker Busted
Spain's populace was as shocked as anybody - the PSOE had won a majority government, and by a healthy margin, in a shocking, epochal landslide. Suarez's UCD collapsed to five seats, just one more than the Communists, as the Socialists and pseudo-Francoist, right-wing alliance People's Coalition absorbed most of the voters stuffed into his centrist bloc. The Socialists won 209 seats
[1], well above the figured needed to command a majority of the Cortes on their own. Gonzalez appeared on television that evening, grinning from ear to ear, raising a clenched fist in the air and declaring "democracy has come to Spain at last!" Behind and in front of him, several Socialist revelers could be seen waving the purple-banded Republican flag.
Gonzalez only made it about halfway through his speech before the feed cut out - in Madrid, several members of the
Bunker had seized control of Prado del Rey, the headquarters for Television Espanola (TVE), the state-owned sole television channel of Spain. Minutes later, tanks were driving into Madrid, and hundreds of confused soldiers were setting up barricades under vague orders of "controlling public unrest." Gonzalez, still speaking to the crowd, was informed of the cut of television feeds and was quickly evacuated, minutes before approximately forty Civil Guardsmen arrived at the scene to attempt to arrest him.
The coup attempt was a debacle. Alfonso Armada, its putative leader, overslept and thus did not make it to Prado del Rey to announce the seizure of government before the television station was besieged by an angry mob of civilians. The Civil Guard posted up in front of the Cortes, but then left late in the night, apparently because they had expected politicians to be there and were shocked to only find janitorial staff and a few civil servants. The decision to stage the coup late in the evening, when Madrilenos were out and about eating, drinking and partying to celebrate the election, meant that coup-sympathetic soldiers and officers ran into inebriated, outraged Spaniards who accosted and assaulted them. Most infantrymen, Guardsmen and even junior officers dispatched to the streets of Madrid and, belatedly, Barcelona and Bilbao were not hardened Francoists like their superiors and threw down their arms when they realized they were being used to put down democracy; nonetheless, about sixty people, most of them protestors, were killed across Spain during the violence, the majority of them in the fight for control of the television studios at Prado del Rey.
Once TVE was back in the hands of civil government, Gonzalez spoke angrily on television, denouncing the coup. The next day, King Juan Carlos I did the same; his silence for a full eighteen hours after broadcasting was under control rankled many on the left and among regionalists, who found it suspicious.
[2] Gonzalez never entertained such thinking, appearing publicly with the King later in the week to project unity in forming a fairly moderate social democratic government to forge ahead with the democratic transition; nonetheless, it became an open question how much, exactly, Madrid controlled the country, and Spain's bumpy road to stability through the 1980s had cleared its largest, though certainly not its last, speed bump...
[1] Seven more than in 1982
[2] There's an open, lively and somewhat conspiratorial debate in Spain to this day about how much exactly Juan Carlos I knew about 23F ahead of time
