(Madrid) King Felipe VI marks Wednesday, without excessive pomp, the 10th anniversary of his accession to the Spanish throne, a decade during which he strove to restore the image of the monarchy, damaged by the excesses of his father Juan Carlos.
“During these years of service, commitment and duty have been the pillars of my action as King,” he declared during a ceremony at the Royal Palace, setting the tone for the day.
“For this reason, service, commitment and duty constitute the theme I have chosen for this anniversary,” he continued. This motto also appeared on Wednesday on the website of the Royal House.
“The King our times needed,” headlined the Madrid daily El Mundo on Wednesday’s front page, adding that the first ten years of his reign “restored prestige to the Crown.”
On June 19, 2014, 17 days after the announcement of the abdication of Juan Carlos, Felipe, then aged 46, was proclaimed King of Spain by the “Cortes”, the Spanish Parliament.
In his first speech that day, he had promised “a renovated monarchy for a new era”, a way of saying that he would do everything to adapt the monarchical institution, undermined by the escapades of his father.
Juan Carlos, who acceded to the throne on the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, was the sovereign of the return to democracy, playing a leading role in consolidating it, notably by helping to thwart the attempted military putsch of the February 23, 1981.
But his reign ended in a deleterious atmosphere, due to revelations about his dissolute private life and his lavish lifestyle, while Spain was plunged into the financial crisis.
For Felipe VI, who aspired to be the sovereign of normality, the objective was quite simply to save the monarchy in a country where, like in the United Kingdom, the king, symbol of unity, reigns but does not govern.
To do this, he immediately took the opposite approach to his father, highlighting the notions of integrity, exemplarity and transparency.
As early as 2015, he withdrew from the Infanta Cristina, his own sister, the title of Duchess of Palma, which Juan Carlos had created for her in 1997, due to a financial scandal in which her husband, the ex- handball champion Iñaki Urdangarin.
The case led to Cristina de Bourbon becoming the first member of the royal family to be tried in court. She was sentenced to pay a fine, while her husband was sentenced in 2018 to five years and ten months in prison.
The other strong measure taken by Felipe VI in this area dates back to 2020, when he renounced his father’s inheritance and decided that he would no longer receive his endowment.
These two decisions followed revelations from the press and the opening by the Spanish justice of several investigations into the very doubtful origin of the fortune of Juan Carlos, who has lived in exile since August 2020 in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates). ).
This first decade of the rule of Felipe VI was marked by a serious crisis, the attempted secession of Catalonia in October 2017, during which he weighed in with all his weight with a solemn speech to the Nation on October 3 to preserve the constitutional order and the unity of Spain.
Have Felipe VI’s efforts to improve the image of the monarchy among his compatriots, particularly young people, paid off? Opinions seem divided.
According to the results of a poll published on Sunday by El Mundo, only 47.4% of Spaniards believe that he has kept his promise, that of a monarchy “renovated for a new era”, 45.1% being of a contrary opinion.
Similarly, while 49.6% of respondents believe that the monarchy is “the best system” for Spain, there are 40.4% who have the opposite opinion.
To win the battle of public opinion, Felipe VI is banking on Leonor, the crown princess, who swore loyalty to the Constitution last October, on her 18th birthday, and can therefore now succeed her father.
The new face of the royal family, Leonor enjoys a very good public image and personifies the future of the Spanish monarchy. Felipe VI also underlined in his speech the “continuity” that it represented.
