Madrid Stages Its Own 1981 Coup Again, Brings Tanks Back to Congress Steps for Seventh Consecutive Season
A Madrid ministry has decided that a faithful recreation of the 1981 parliamentary putsch must be performed live, at full scale, every year, with civil servants cast as the rebels.
The Spanish Ministry of Cultural Continuity has ordered that the failed coup of 23 February 1981 be restaged in full each autumn, beginning this year, on the steps of the Congreso de los Diputados. Officials said the decision followed a review of a four-part television drama that, in their view, had shown audiences how easily democracy can slip. The ministry has concluded that viewers should not merely watch the danger but rehearse it.
Ministry staff have been assigned roles according to a casting list drawn up by the department's own committee. Mid-level administrators will play the armed officers who burst into the chamber, while a junior archivist has been given the part of the prime minister who refuses to leave his seat. Rehearsals begin each morning at six, and the department has bought forty-two wooden chairs so that the scene can be performed without deviation from the original floor plan.
Demand for seats has been so high that the ministry has begun charging an entrance fee, a decision it describes as a commitment to historical rigour. Schools in the capital have been instructed to bring pupils to the square, where they are expected to shout the lines delivered by the democratic side. Teachers who had planned to take pupils on a museum visit have been informed that the museum itself will now be relocated to the parliamentary steps for the duration of the autumn season.
The minister has defended the programme in a statement issued from the same steps. «A democracy that cannot remember its near miss is a democracy that will have another one», he said, adding that the ministry would consider extending the performance to a second evening if the first proved insufficiently alarming.
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