A coup d'état was attempted in Spain in February 1981 by right-wing, Francoist elements of the Civil Guard and the Spanish military. The failure of the coup marked the last serious attempt to revert Spain to a Francoist state and served to consolidate Spain's democratization process. King Juan Carlos I played a major role in foiling the coup, and the monarchy emerged with renewed legitimacy as a result.
The coup, which became known in Spain as 23F, began on 23 February 1981 when Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero, along with 200 armed Civil Guard officers, stormed the Congress of Deputies chamber in Madrid during a vote to swear in Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo as President of the Government. The officers held the parliamentarians and ministers hostage for 18 hours, during which the King denounced the coup in a public television broadcast, calling for rule of law and the democratic government to continue. The royal address fatally undermined the coup, and the hostage-takers surrendered the next morning and all deputies were freed. A simultaneous coup attempt, executed by Captain General Jaime Milans del Bosch in Valencia, also failed. Tejero, Milans del Bosch and a third conspirator, General Alfonso Armada, were sentenced to thirty years in prison. In 1988 the Spanish Supreme Court suggested pardoning Alfonso Armada and Tejero; the government of Felipe González pardoned the former.
On 24 February 2026, following the 45th anniversary of the coup d’etat, the Spanish Government declassified confidential documents from the event.
Background
The coup attempt was linked to the Spanish transition to democracy. Four factors generated tensions that the governing Democratic Center Union (UCD) coalition of conservative parties could not contain:
- almost 20% unemployment, capital flight, and 16% inflation, which were caused by an economic crisis
- difficulty devolving governance to Spanish regions
- increased violence by the Basque terrorist group ETA
- opposition to the fledgling democracy from within the Spanish Armed Forces
The first signs of unease in the army appeared in April 1977. Admiral Gabriel Pita da Veiga resigned as Minister of the Navy and formed the Superior Council of the Army. This was a result of Pita da Veiga's disagreement with the legalisation of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) on 9 April 1977, following the Atocha massacre by neo-fascist terrorists. In November 1978, the Operation Galaxia military putsch was put down. Its leader, Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero, was sentenced to seven months in prison.
While seditious sentiments grew in sectors of the military and extreme right, the government faced a serious crisis at the beginning of the decade, and its position became increasingly untenable in the course of 1980. Key events saw the resignation of the Minister of Culture, Manuel Clavero on 15 January; the restructuring of the government on 3 May; the motion of no confidence against Adolfo Suárez moved by the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) between 28 May and 30 May; the resignation on 22 July of the vice-president, Fernando Abril Martorell, which produced a new reshuffle in September; and the election in October of Miguel Herrero y Rodríguez de Miñón, alternative candidate of the official bid for President of UCD.
The growing weakness of Suárez at the heart of his own party led to his televised resignation both as Prime Minister (officially "President of the Government") and President of UCD on 29 January 1981. On 1 February, the Almendros Collective published an openly insurgent article in the far-right newspaper El Alcázar, which was the mouthpiece of the Búnker hardliners, including Carlos Arias Navarro, Luis Carrero Blanco's successor as Prime Minister, and the leader of the francoist party Fuerza Nueva, Blas Piñar. From 2 to 4 February, King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofía visited Guernica, where the provincial deputies of Basque separatist party Herri Batasuna received them with boos and hisses and various incidents. On 6 February, the chief engineer of the Lemoniz Nuclear Power Plant project, José María Ryan, was found murdered, having been kidnapped a few days earlier by ETA. Meanwhile, there was no further news about industrialist Luis Suñer after his abduction.
In this atmosphere of mounting tension, the process of choosing Suárez's successor began. Between 6 and 9 February, the 2nd UCD congress in Mallorca made it clear that the party was unravelling and Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún was named President of UCD. On 10 February, Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo was named candidate for Prime Minister.
Political flashpoint
Tensions came to a head on 13 February, when news emerged of the torture and murder in Carabanchel of Joseba Arregi Izagirre, a member of ETA, who had been held incommunicado for ten days in the Directorate-General for Security (Dirección General de Seguridad). A general strike in the Basque region and an acrimonious debate between opposing parliamentary groups in the Congress followed. The government then dismissed various police chiefs, while in the Ministry of the Interior there were resignations in solidarity with the torturers. El Alcázar newspaper judged the government's actions a show of weakness that needed to be stopped.
Against this extraordinary backdrop, Calvo Sotelo presented his proposed government on 18 February, but, during congressional voting on 20 February, he failed to obtain the necessary majority approval for confirmation as Prime Minister, so a new vote was scheduled for 23 February: the day the conspirators chose for their coup d'état. As planned, the coup would require Tejero, General Jaime Milans del Bosch, and General Alfonso Armada—a confidant of the King—as its principal instigators.
Coup
Assault on the Congress of Deputies
On Monday 23 February 1981, at 18:00 CET (17:00 UTC), the second round of the roll-call vote for the investiture of Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo as Prime Minister began at the Congress of Deputies plenary hall in the Palace of the Cortes in Madrid, with all deputies and members of the acting government present. At 18:23, as PSOE deputy Manuel Núñez Encabo was standing up to cast his vote, 200 Guardia Civil agents armed with submachine guns and led by Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero, burst into the congressional chamber. Tejero, gun in hand, immediately took the Speaker's platform and shouted "¡Quieto todo el mundo!" ("Everyone stay still!"), ordering everyone to lie down on the floor with "¡Al suelo todo el mundo!" ("Everyone on the floor!").
As the highest-ranking military official present, acting Deputy Prime Minister Army General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado stood up and refused to comply, confronting Tejero and ordering him to stand down and hand over the weapon. Acting prime minister Adolfo Suárez made a move to join Gutiérrez Mellado, who briefly scuffled with several civil guards until Tejero fired a shot into the air, which was followed by a sustained burst of submachine-gun fire into the air from the assailants. All the deputies threw themselves to the floor, except for three: Suárez; Gutiérrez Mellado; and PCE leader Santiago Carrillo, who calmly lit a cigarette and remained seated. Undeterred, arms akimbo in defiance, 68-year-old Gutiérrez Mellado refused to sit down, even after Tejero attempted, unsuccessfully, to wrestle him to the floor. Their face-off ended with Tejero returning to the rostrum and Gutiérrez Mellado returning to his seat. The shots into the air wounded some of the visitors in the chamber's upper gallery and pierced the ceiling.
Immediately afterwards, Socialists' Party of Catalonia (PSC) deputy Anna Balletbò, who was four months pregnant with twins, was allowed to leave the chamber assisted by two of the rebels guards; and after confronting the rebels at the entrance, she was the first person allowed to leave the building. The first thing she did was call her family and the President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Jordi Pujol, to ask for the King's telephone number. The King asked her how many assailants there were and what their ranks were, she informed him that Tejero was possibly responsible, as her seatmate Julio Busquets, had told her while they were crouching down.
Televisión Española (TVE) was recording the investiture for later use of the footage. The assailants immediately disabled the television cameras by force, but a TVE operator, Pedro Francisco Martín, managed to continue transmitting from one of the four cameras without their noticing. TVE's headquarters, Prado del Rey, was receiving the transmission through an internal closed circuit and half an hour of the incident was recorded. Fernando Castedo, General Director of RTVE, hid the tape with the footage inside his chair's cushion and sat on it when some military rebels took Prado del Rey for more than one hour. However, members of the private radio station Cadena SER continued their live broadcast with open microphones from within the plenary hall, which meant that the general public was able to follow along by radio as events unfolded. As such, the date is sometimes remembered as "the Night of Transistor Radios" (La noche de los transistores).
Several minutes after the assault, everyone was allowed to sit in their seats at the congressional chamber with their hands visible, which caused the deputies to retake their assigned congressional seats with their hands resting on the seat in front of them. Guardia Civil Captain, Jesús Muñecas Aguilar, strode to the Speaker's platform to announce that everyone present were to wait for the arrival of "the competent military authority" who would determine what would happen; and that everyone could stay calm since nothing bad would happen.
At 19:35, Suárez stood up and asked to speak to the commanders. Shots were fired in response, and a guard flashed a submachine gun towards the deputies' seats, demanding silence. One of the assailants ordered, "Mr. Suárez, stay in your seat!". Suárez was about to reply when someone else shouted, "siéntate maldita sea" ("Sit down, damn it!"). Finally, Tejero grabbed Suárez by the arm and led him forcefully to a room outside the chamber. When Suárez demanded that Tejero explain "this madness"; Tejero's only reply was "¡Todo por España!" ("Everything for Spain!"). When Suárez pressed the point, citing his authority as President of the Government, Tejero—using the informal "tú"—replied, "¡Tú ya no eres presidente de nada!" ("You are no longer the president of anything!").
Shortly afterward, five of the parliament's deputies were separated from the rest: Suárez; Carrillo; the opposition and PSOE leader, Felipe González, and his deputy, Alfonso Guerra; and the Minister of Defence, Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún. The insurgents' hope, in taking both the executive and legislative authorities prisoner, was to create a power vacuum that would force a new political order.
Almost at the same time, the Captain General of the III Military Region, Jaime Milans del Bosch, joined the coup with a revolt in Valencia, ordering tanks to be brought out onto the streets and declaring a general state of emergency in an attempt to convince other senior military figures to align with him in supporting the coup. Meanwhile, another insurgent, General Luis Torres Rojas, failed in his attempt to oust General José Juste from the Army's Armoured Division No. 1 "Brunete", resulting in Torres Rojas having to abandon his plan to take control of key strategic points in Madrid, including Prado del Rey—TVE and Radio Nacional de España (RNE) headquarters—and, therefore, firsthand control of the information as events unfolded.
At 21:00, the Director of National Security, Francisco Laína, published a statement on TVE which announced that, under the instructions of the King, a provisional government would be formed with the undersecretaries of different ministries in order to ensure State government in alliance with the Board of Joint Chiefs of Staff (Junta de Jefes del Estado Mayor) and led by himself. The command center for the forces deployed to end the occupation of Congress was set up in the office of the director of the Palace Hotel, right in front of the Palace of the Cortes.
The coup was vehemently condemned by member countries of the European Economic Community (EEC), especially since Spain was in preliminary negotiations for membership (eventually joining in 1986). Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the UK, called the coup a "terrorist act." Alexander Haig, US Secretary of State, described the coup as an "internal affair".
Armada's soft coup
Originally, Armada, one of the coup's conspirators, had advocated a "milder" course of action, which he then proceeded to implement. As he tried to enter the Palace of Zarzuela, the royal residence, Armada offered the monarch a trade-off: the king would head a new "government of salvation" that would replace the democratically elected one in the hopes of appeasing Tejero and his forces and thereby avoiding a return to the full military dictatorship the conspirators were demanding.
The King, however, refused to receive Armada, who, shortly before midnight, entered the Congress of Deputies alleging that the King had ordered him to assume leadership of the government. As Armada was not the "competent military authority" that Tejero had been waiting for, the latter rejected Armada's claims with "My general, I didn't assault Congress for this" and, after that, ignored him.