Last hours of a cloudy reign

  • Today the abdication of Juan Carlos of Bourbon will become official with a ceremony and the passage of a "fundamental law"

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18.06.2014 - 11:26

La premsa lliure no la paga el govern, la paguen els lectors


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Juan Carlos of Bourbon is facing his last day as the King of Spain and head of state. Tomorrow, his son Felipe will take the baton during the act of coronation. But first, it will be necessary to hold the sanctioning ceremony and the passage of the ‘fundamental law” that makes Juan Carlos’ abdication go into effect. It will be held this afternoon in the Royal Palace in Madrid. The principal authorities of the Spanish State will be in attendance, with the exception of Catalan President Artur Mas who will not have yet returned from his trip to the United States. This afternoon’s event will be the last one that Juan Carlos presides as head of state. Tomorrow he will not attend the coronation of his son, according to the official explanation, in order to keep the focus on the new monarch. With the abdication, Juan Carlos brings to an end a thirty-nine year reign full of murky incidents.

Lack of legitimacy

Indeed, his reign began in rather murky circumstances. Juan Carlos was designated by dictator Francisco Franco to be his successor and he swore loyalty to the dictator, to the Francoist laws, and to the principles of the Movimiento, Franco’s “political party”. Legally, the king’s legitimacy is based on Franco’s coup d’etat, and specifically on the law of succession of the head of state approved by the Francoist parliament in 1947. He has no historical legitimacy. The law of succession of the head of state of 1947 is a legal travesty whose only strength is based on the dictator’s successful military takeover of the country. Franco assigned himself the role of regent, without calling himself that, and it is clear that only he, and no one else, will decide who will be the king (see this video taken on the day that Juan Carlos swore to be Franco’s successor). With no historical legitimacy at all.

From that moment forward, the king has worn a shield of arms, a seal and a standard that to this day maintain intact pre-Constitutional, Francoist symbols, including those of the Movimiento Nacional, the yoke and the arrows. Armand de Fluvià, who is an expert on heraldry, asked in 2004 why these symbols had not been changed and if the King of Spain considered them appropriate.

In addition to the formal continuity of Francoism that Juan Carlos represents, the king has never retracted or modified any of the declarations of recognition or admiration that he expressed for the dictatorial regime, like those which he gave in an interview on French television and in this speech as his proclamation as King of Spain.

He also has never asked forgiveness for the words spoken in the speech given during the Miguel de Cervantes prize ceremony upon giving the award to Francisco Umbral, when he said, “Spanish has never been a language of imposition, but instead one of encounters; No one has ever been forced to speak Spanish: a wide variety of peoples have freely adopted the language of Cervantes.”

23-F (February 23, 1981 attempted coup d’etat)
If the lack of legitimacy for the very origin as regent put Juan Carlos’ mandate
on very shaky ground, his management in the job has also been more than questionable. In the first place, one of the most debated and contested episodes in Spain’s recent history: the coup d’etat of February 23, 1981. The German weekly Der Spiegel published just two years ago a report sent by Lothar Lahn, German ambassador to Spain in 1981, which revealed that Juan Carlos had expressed understanding for the leaders of the February 23 coup d’etat. The magazine based its report on a dispatch sent by the ambassador to Helmut Schmidt’s social democratic government and which was recently declassified as part of the publication of “Historical Documents of West Germany’s Foreign Policy. The report describes the content of a conversation between Lahn and the Spanish king on March 26, 1981 in which Juan Carlos, far from rejecting or being indignant about the rebels, shows “understanding and sympathy” for them.

A scandalous fortune
After thirty-nine years, Juan Carlos has amassed a huge fortune, which is difficult to calculate because of the opacity with which the Spanish royal house has always acted. Only the figures from 2011 have been published, but without including various aspects related to the crown, like trips, security, official vehicles, and many other items related to the Ministers of Defense, Interior, Economy, Foreign Affairs… Also not included are the profits that the Spanish king has earned through acting as a middleman in the negotiation of multimillion dollar contracts.

A year and a half ago, the New York Times published a report on the Spanish King’s fortune, with data that has rarely appeared in the Spanish press. “Unlike other European monarchs, Juan Carlos came to the throne after the death of the dictator Gen. Francisco Franco in 1975 with virtually nothing, and has worked hard to generate his own fortune beyond the annual 8.3 million euro budget, or $10.7 million, bestowed on the palace by the Spanish government.”

But the article goes further: “The king is widely valued in business circles for acting as a sometime deal maker and economic ambassador for his nation, but how he has amassed his substantial personal wealth remains secret. The Spanish royal family’s wealth has been estimated at up to $2.3 billion, a sum that supporters contend was inflated by the inclusion of government properties.”

Botswana and fraud
The Spanish king’s lack of legitimacy and economic profiteering have been two constant elements in his reign, full of controversial events like African safari hunts—the last of which, in Botswana, was discovered only because he tripped and broke his hip, and which unleashed an international scandal—the numerous extramarital affairs—in a recent article in Forbes Magazine, they counted more than 1500—and the cases of corruption that have come to light over the past years, in particular those that are focused on the king’s daughter, Cristina, and his son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarín.

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