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The moment reminded me, save the distances that allow any kind of historical analogy, of the campaign and victory of another candidate whose slogan also centered on the popular call for change: Felipe González. In 1982, I was only 10, but I remember well going to vote with my mother, convinced, as was nearly my entire family, that the victory of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in the general elections was something like the victory of Allende in Chile in 1970: not just the end of the dictatorship but the peaceful route to socialism. It's worth remembering that just one year earlier Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero had entered the Congress of Deputies, pistol in hand, to remind us all that we could still return to the ominous years of the dictatorship. The charisma of González, the rumpled style of Alfonso Guerra, the 800,000 jobs and the promise to not enter NATO, brought to power a party of leftists for the first time since the victory of the Popular Front in the 1936 elections. As happened on November 4, it was very difficult to remove oneself from the explosion of collective happiness; I still remember clearly the tears on my mother's face, who thought that her children would have more freedom and a better future.
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