Torcuato Fernandez-Miranda

Torcuato Fernández-Miranda y Hevia (Gijón, November 10, 1915 – London, June 19, 1980) was a Spanish politician and jurist, known for his role in recent years of the Franco dictatorship and for having been professor of Political Law to Juan Carlos I. He is considered a strategist in the process of transition to democracy in Spain, and one of its three architects, along with Juan Carlos I and Adolfo Suárez. He temporarily held the presidency of the Government in December 1973, after the assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco until the assumption of Carlos Arias Navarro. He held the noble title of Duke of Fernández-Miranda.

Biography

Early years and Francoism

His early years were spent in Asturias. He studied at the Colegio de la Inmaculada de Gijón before graduating in Law at the University of Oviedo, where he later obtained a position as Professor of Political Law. In the 1940s, he voted in favor of Enrique Tierno Galván in the opposition court where he was awarded the chair, thus recognizing his academic work. He became rector of the University of Oviedo between 1951 and 1953. In 1960 he was appointed Director of Secondary Education and University Education.

In the late 1950s, Tierno Galván belonged to a mostly monarchical organization called the Unión Española, but he also wanted to help strengthen ties between anti-Franco groups inside and outside Spain. On the occasion of being Tierno Galván in Madrid at the beginning of the 1960-61 academic year, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda, as director of University Education, called him to inform him that he was suspended from employment and salary as a professor by virtue of a December provision of 1957 by which it was allowed to suspend officials under process (Tierno was). Since the suspension had been communicated to him orally and not in writing, Tierno protested declaring it null and void and then Fernández-Miranda threatened him with being charged with the crime of military rebellion if he moved to Salamanca and there were incidents there. Although he could not get the statement in writing, on the advice of his friend and fellow professional Manuel Fraga Iribarne, he decided to give classes as a visiting professor at Princeton University, in the United States, and returned to be a professor at the University of Salamanca in 1962. That same year he left the Spanish Union.

Although the reason for Tierno's trial was unknown in the academic world, his situation aroused the solidarity of several professors. the "academic discrimination of the faculty" in a 1960 letter signed by Aranguren, Laín Entralgo, Terán, Dámaso Alonso and others. This was the second protest letter signed by academics (the first was in 1956) and others would follow later.

Torcuato Fernández-Miranda began in politics, since the position of rector gave him the implicit position of attorney in Franco's courts. He held various general directorates in the Ministries of Education and Labor until reaching the position of general secretary of the Movement, the single party of the Franco regime, between 1969 and 1974.

This final period of Francoism was a period of growing social unrest, to which the dictatorship responded with repression, and in which some politicians had realized how difficult it would be for the regime to survive when the dictator died. This led Fernández-Miranda to propose as a way out the adoption of the State of "political associations" as vehicles for citizen participation. The project was aborted with the assassination of Carrero Blanco in 1973 and the rise of Carlos Arias Navarro.

Since 1969 he was a professor of Political Law, mentor and adviser to the then-Prince Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos had previously been named "successor in the head of state with the title of king".

During the brief period in which Luis Carrero Blanco was president of the government, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda was vice president. After the assassination of Carrero Blanco by ETA on December 20, 1973, Fernández-Miranda became interim president of the government for eleven days.

He was one of the main candidates to succeed Carrero Blanco in the Presidency of the Government, but his declared political independence (he was not part of any of the "families" of the regime) and the proximity of Carlos Arias Navarro, former mayor of Madrid, the wife Carmen Polo de Franco and the son-in-law of General Franco, Cristóbal Martínez-Bordiú, tipped the balance in his favor, despite the fact that, as Minister of the Interior at the time of the attack, he was criticized for his incompetence.

Fernández-Miranda was consulted by the king about his preferences regarding being appointed president of the Government or president of the Cortes. His response was:

Your Majesty, the political animal that I carry inside asks me for the presidency of the government, but I think I will be more useful to you since the presidency of the Courts.

He is, therefore, appointed president of the Cortes, a position that entailed the Presidency of the Council of the Kingdom, succeeding Alejandro Rodríguez de Valcárcel. From this position, he was able to guide the king about the ins and outs of the post-Franco political system, controlling and dismantling, from within, the springs of power that the so-called "bunker" still had.

Transition to democracy

On October 30, 1975, then-Prince Juan Carlos assumed the interim Head of State. On November 13, Carlos Arias Navarro, president of the government under Franco's mandate, presented his resignation to the prince, knowing that he would not accept it. In this way, Arias Navarro demonstrated his power in front of the new Head of State.

On the death of General Franco on November 20, Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón is proclaimed King of Spain on November 22, 1975.

The journalist and "chronicler" of the Pilar Urbano Transition, performs the following analysis:

Died Franco opened two paths: rupture or reform. The rupturists wanted to liquidate the state armour immediately, the dictatorship to the dump, and build with a new plant. It could be fast, like a demolition, but with unforeseen risks. [...] The king, on the other hand, preferred a serene reform, a step in time, without fearful acrobatics. [...] Torcuato had explained it a hundred times. The Basic Laws were not only modifiable, but derogable.

Arias Navarro did not want to resign, arguing that Franco's appointment to be president of the government was for five years and would expire in 1979.

The king did not believe he had enough power to remove the president of the government, Carlos Arias Navarro. However, on November 28, he proposed to include Torcuato in the shortlist for the Council of the Kingdom. Arias feels safe and accepts the King's request. Arias would help the Council of the Kingdom put him on the shortlist because he knew of the good relations between Torcuato and the king and thought that if Torcuato stayed there, he would not have to worry. to be replaced by him in the presidency of the Government.

On December 1st, the Council of the Kingdom met to draw up the list of names among which Juan Carlos had to choose the new President of the Cortes. The meeting, chaired by Manuel Lora Tamayo, lasted about 4 hours. After the meeting, Valentín Silva Melenero informed Torcuato that everything had gone well. On December 2, José Antonio Girón de Velasco met with Fernández-Miranda and told him He conveyed that the king could not act like Franco and that Carlos Arias should continue in his position. On December 3, Fernández-Miranda was sworn in at the Palacio de la Zarzuela as President of the Parliament and of the Council of the Kingdom and, later, he took office in the Hall of the Lost Steps of the Parliament. his inauguration speech said:

We are what God and our parents have put in us. We are what psychology, biology and personality contributes to us. But we are, above all, what we do. I feel absolutely responsible for all my past. I am faithful to him. But it does not attack me, because the service to the homeland and the King is a future company. The key to my behavior will be to serve Spain in the person of the King. Time will be for words, ideas and actions.

Torcuato was in favor of reforming the Fundamental Laws of the Kingdom through his own provisions in order to achieve democracy thus avoiding legal loopholes; with his words, go "from law to law through law". Torquato wrote:

Not a little warlord but a great king

Do not break, go from one situation to another from the law
No break, reform from the Succession Act, 2/3 and referendum

Integrate left

Torcuato Fernández-Miranda's idea was to establish a system with two political parties, one conservative and the other more liberal, and which in his opinion could be the (historical) Spanish Socialist Workers' Party presided over by Rodolfo Llopis, and which It was characterized by being more moderate than the PSOE Renewed of the interior, headed since 1976 by Felipe González, Alfonso Guerra, Javier Solana and Enrique Múgica, after the split of the Suresnes Congress.

Arias Navarro was commissioned by Juan Carlos I to renew the Council of Ministers. With the monarch's approval, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda went to the house of Arias Navarro, known as La Chiripa, to discuss the new ministers and proposed that the portfolio of Minister of the Movement go to Adolfo Suárez González. Suárez, in his Originally, he had been sponsored in politics by Fernando Herrero Tejedor, who had also been Secretary General of the Movement.

Seeking to speed up the reforms, Fernández-Miranda created a mixed commission made up of members of the Government and the National Council of the Movement. It was something atypical because the government was the one that legislated and the chamber was the one that executed. At that time, Adolfo Suárez was Minister-Secretary General of the Movement and, at the same time, attorney in Parliament and national counselor.

On March 2, 1976, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda met the Council of the Kingdom in Zarzuela for the first and last time. The objective was to make known to the Cortes, the National Council and the Government that their refusal or obstruction of political reform could be easily saved by the king resorting to a national referendum.

Arias Navarro was upset because Minister Villar Mir's economic measures had already been in Parliament for two weeks and had to be approved. Arias proposed asking Juan Carlos I to govern by Decree Law and that his first decree was to dissolve the Cortes. This would have created a government without courts or freely constituted parties, with a king at the service of the government. To avoid this, Fernández-Miranda decided to apply the urgent procedure to the laws processed by the Cortes. On May 7, he met the Cortes to explain, and defend before them, the urgent procedure to process the laws. This was published in the Official State Gazette on April 23. This established times to debate and amend the laws and strengthened the role of the President of the Cortes.

On April 7, 1976, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda met the Mixed Government-National Council Commission to propose a reform of the Cortes. This would consist of a bicameral parliament with the National Council of the Movement integrated in the Senate.

Arias was excessively immobile and neither the King nor Fernández-Miranda wanted him to continue as Prime Minister. At that time, Adolfo Suárez was screening the National Movement to find candidates with whom to form a center party. Fernández-Miranda saw in Suárez a great candidate for president because Suárez was committed to very general principles, such as freedom of association, but he was not intransigent with his own ideas and did not make impositions on the structure that the State should have. The monarch he considered that Suárez was not sufficiently seasoned in politics, but on Torcuato's advice he included him in a list of possible presidents. The list was made up of: Areilza, Fraga, López de Letona, Pérez de Bricio, Federico Silva, López Bravo and Adolfo Suarez.

After the resignation, forced by the king, of Arias Navarro on July 1, 1976, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda met the Council of the Kingdom in the Mariana Pineda Hall of the Palace of Parliament to draw up a short list of which the The king had to choose the new President of the Government. There were 16 members plus the President of the Council, Fernández-Miranda, but only 15 had attended. Each of the 15 drew up a list with possible candidates, adding a total of 32 characters. Torcuato then proposed that 29 be eliminated from that list of 32 with the arguments set forth therein. For this, a vote was carried out and the candidate who did not obtain 8 votes would be suppressed. Thus, through free voting systems, a list of 9 members was left. At the end of the day they were summoned for the next one, and thus on the morning of July 3 there were already 6 candidates left. On that day, there were finally 3 candidates left: Federico Silva, with 15 votes, Gregorio López Bravo, with 13 votes, and Adolfo Suárez, with 12 votes.

Fernández-Miranda, who in addition to chairing it had a voice and vote on the Council, "pulls the strings" so that Suárez would be in the mandatory list of candidates, as he and the monarch wanted. Hence the then enigmatic words of Fernández-Miranda at the end of the last session of the Council of the Kingdom, with the three names already decided: "I am in a position to offer the King what the King has asked of me".

Manuel Fraga considered that he was much more suitable for the position than Suárez. Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo wrote in 1990:

The inclusion of Adolfo Suárez in the Terna of the Council of the Kingdom and his appointment by the king as President of the Government (July 1976) came to brutally and intelligently break the legitimate and well-founded aspirations that Manuel Fraga had placed on his centrist project: he has always seen those decisions as a great mistake of Torcuato Fernández-Miranda and the King.

The strategy of going "from law to law" it needed a bridge law that was clear, brief and simple. To do this, in the summer of 1976 Suárez commissioned the best jurists in the State to draw up drafts that had to be delivered to Suárez between August 11 and 12. The drafts had styles as different as their authors: José Manuel Otero Novas, Miguel Herrero y Rodríguez de Miñón and Eduardo Navarro, with specific contributions from José Miguel Ortí Bordas, Félix Hernández Gil, Aurelio Menéndez, etc. A draft of the law to Professor Carlos Ollero Gómez. However, Suárez did not know what to do with so many drafts and schemes, so he sent for Fernández-Miranda, who was in Asturias, to make a decision on how the law should be. Fernández-Miranda collected all those documents and took them to Navacerrada on August 21 and 22 to study them. On Monday the 23rd, he went to his office in the Palacio de las Cortes and handed over his manuscript work to Juan Sierra so that he could pass it clean. Then he went to see Suárez at Paseo de la Castellana, number 3, and handed him the document with a note that said: "Here I leave you this that has no father." In other words, it was the result of the work of many people, everyone and none.

After reading it, the president of the government transferred it to the Council of Ministers commenting that he believed he had the solution to the problem. That text became the Law for Political Reform.

This law, drafted by Torcuato Fernández-Miranda, was the legal instrument that allowed the Franco regime to be legally dismantled with the approval of the Cortes themselves, appointed years before by General Franco, for which reason it was also known as the &# 34;Franco hara-kiri". Several attorneys opposed to the Political Reform Law were extorted with SECED dossiers.

With the approval of the law, the bases of the current electoral system were also established, agreed between Suárez and Alianza Popular. Fernández-Miranda, considering that his work had already been accomplished, resigned as president of the Parliament before monarch and he accepted it. The resignation would become effective after the elections of June 15, 1977, which would set up a new assembly.

The king appointed him a senator in those Constituent Cortes.

As a reward for his work, as a symbol of his greatest respect and consideration for his former teacher, he granted him the title of Duke of Fernández-Miranda. In June 1977 he was named a Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the highest decoration awarded by the King, which had already been awarded to other Spanish politicians of great historical relevance such as Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, Práxedes Mateo Sagasta or Antonio Maura.

Last years

Retired from politics, after several disagreements with Adolfo Suárez, he was in London finalizing the details for the creation of a legal consultancy company when he suffered a serious heart attack. He died on June 19, 1980 at the Saint Mary Clinic in Paddington in the British capital. His remains were transferred to Barajas Airport on June 20 and then taken by car to Navacerrada, where they were buried on the 21st.

On June 27, a modest funeral mass took place in the chapel of the Palacio de la Zarzuela, attended by the close family of Torcuato Fernández-Miranda, Juan Carlos I and the Minister of Justice representing the Government.