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Spanish Cabinet to Draft Law Enabling Abdication Spaniards Divided on Question of Need for Monarchy
(about 5 hours later)
MADRID — The Spanish cabinet met on Tuesday to formalize legislative and constitutional arrangements to permit King Juan Carlos to abdicate, heralding what the monarchy hopes will be a resurgence of popularity under his son, Crown Prince Felipe. MADRID — There is no doubt that King Juan Carlos played an essential role in ushering Spain toward democracy, and later remained a respected voice that could advocate his nation abroad while also providing a necessary balm at critical moments to heal old wounds and mediate disputes at home from above the political fray.
The Spanish monarch announced on Monday that, after a reign of 39 years during which he helped cement his country’s transition to democracy from dictatorship, the king wanted to hand the throne to his 46-year-old son, saying it was time for a new generation to “move to the front line” and face the country’s challenges. Yet 35 years into the country’s democratic journey, his announcement on Monday that he would abdicate in favor of his son Felipe, 46, immediately raised the question of whether Spain needed a monarchy at all. Only hours after the king addressed the nation, thousands of Spaniards took to the streets of Madrid, Barcelona and other cities, to demand a referendum on whether to maintain the institution.
His abdication will be the first time the monarchy has changed hands since the death of the dictator Gen. Francisco Franco in 1975, when Juan Carlos, now 76, came to the throne. Those who might actually vote to abolish the monarchy are probably a vocal minority. Even so, just under 50 percent of Spaniards said they supported the monarchy, according to an opinion poll published in January by conservative newspaper El Mundo and carried out by pollster Sigma Dos.
The precise thinking behind the king’s decision has not been publicly explained. But he has been in poor health and has been tainted by a corruption scandal swirling around his son-in-law that has illuminated the wide gap between the royal family’s lifestyle and finances and those of ordinary Spaniards at a time of economic crisis and record joblessness. Those divided feelings reflect the challenge that even a king from a new generation will face in rehabilitating an institution whose approval ratings were badly eroded by recent family money scandals and by questions about the high living of the 76-year-old king at a time when Spaniards were suffering through the worst economy in generations.
Within hours of his announcement on Monday, antiroyalist Spaniards had gathered in Madrid and other cities to show their opposition to the monarchy. Some argue that Juan Carlos may have preserved the monarchy by stepping aside, however belatedly.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy presided on Tuesday over a meeting of his cabinet to help set a timetable for the abdication, which is likely to happen in a matter of weeks. At the meeting, the cabinet is also supposed to draft legislation enabling the king to step down. Felipe’s coronation should “absolutely help decrease anti-monarchy feelings in this country,” said José Antonio Zarzalejos, a political columnist and former editor in chief of the conservative newspaper ABC, who is an ardent supporter of the monarchy. “The Republican movement would have got stronger if King Juan Carlos had insisted that he should hold on, but we’re now talking about a new king who comes with an absolutely clean trajectory and is in tune with the issues of our time.”
The government is hoping that a full parliamentary session can then ratify the abdication law next week. An exact timetable has not been set, but Felipe is expected to be crowned as King Felipe VI by mid-July. Ratification requires an absolute parliamentary majority, which the governing Popular Party has. Even so, the king’s recent problems have gone well beyond age and health issues, touching on the increasingly raw nerves over the sense of privilege that has insulated Spain’s elites from the pains of austerity as the income gap widens. Primary among the king’s problems was a court investigation into whether his son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, embezzled millions from sports events.
The king and his son appeared together at a military ceremony outside Madrid while the cabinet was meeting, news reports said. Writing in newspaper El Mundo, Jorge de Esteban, the president of the publication’s editorial board, said that “the abdication would have been more sensible three or four years ago, when the Urdangarin scandal had not yet contaminated the Spanish crown.”
On Monday, Mr. Rajoy called the abdication “proof of the maturity of our democracy” — a message echoed by most of Spain’s political establishment. Some far-left politicians, however, have demanded a referendum on whether to maintain the monarchy. In response to the recent scandals, the Spanish royal household had already become more transparent about its spending. In February, it unveiled an annual budget of 7.8 million euros (or more than $10.6 million), down 2 percent from 2013. It included a salary of 292,752 euros for Juan Carlos and half that amount for his son. The household also revealed that the king’s health problems and surgeries had cost just over 165,000 euros in a year.
“I think the monarchy has the support of the great majority in Spain,” Mr. Rajoy said on Tuesday when he was asked about the demand for a referendum on the monarchy during a conference in Madrid, Agence France-Presse reported. But the Spanish royal family has not disclosed the value of its assets, nor provided the kind of details available in Britain, where royal spending is made public down to laundry costs. In the most recent financial year, the British government spent 33.3 million British pounds — or nearly $60 million — on the monarchy.
“Propose a constitutional reform if you don’t like this constitution. You have the perfect right to do so. But what you cannot do in a democracy is bypass the law,” Mr. Rajoy said. Herman Matthijs, a professor of public finance at the University of Brussels who analyzes government spending on Europe’s royalty, said that the Spanish royal family’s annual budget looked “quite cheap” compared to other monarchies, but “on the other hand we don’t know anything about the wealth of the royal family, which is treated like a state secret, and they also really live for free because all the expenditure of their houses and palaces are in the state budget.”
Mr. Matthijs suggested an abdication was “an ideal moment to make some changes and the protests in Spain showed that it might be time to move to more of a protocol system, like in the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, where there is less power for the king.”
Since Monday, the anti-royal movement has spread beyond the streets of Spain. Helena Fernández de Bobadilla, a Spaniard who works for an insurance broker in London, said she felt that the monarchy was “obsolete” and signed an online petition calling for a royal referendum.
“Spaniards as citizens should have the right to vote which way we want to go forward and the monarchy should earn democratically their right to reign,” she said. “Unfortunately the Spanish royal family has disappointed us a lot lately.”
Among those who support a referendum is Podemos, a new, anti-establishment party that won almost 8 percent of the Spanish vote in last month’s elections to the European Parliament. In a statement, Podemos argued that Spaniards should be treated as citizens and not subjects, with a right to decide on the monarchy’s future that, if ignored, could “deepen the system’s already very serious legitimacy crisis.”
Such a call, however, is largely falling on deaf ears. Instead, the conservative government, whose Popular Party has a parliamentary majority, drafted on Tuesday a law that Parliament is expected to adopt, paving the way for the coronation of Felipe VI on June 18.
Asked about the anti-royal movement, Mariano Rajoy, prime minister of Spain, said on Tuesday that such a referendum would require a change in the Constitution, and that in any case, “the monarchy has the support of the great majority in Spain.”
The limited prospect of a referendum has left supporters and detractors of the monarchy little alternative but to place hopes of restoring and changing the institution on Felipe, who has shown already that he can steer clear of scandal, even while increasingly substituting for his ailing father.
But Felipe will also start out “with a lot less power to change things than his father, whose authority was almost unlimited when he came to the throne,” said Josep Ramoneda, a writer and philosopher.
While the handover in Madrid follows the similar abdication and succession of monarchs last year in both the Netherlands and Belgium, the case of Spain is “quite specific” and different to that of other European countries, said Mary Vincent, the head of modern European history at the University of Sheffield.
“It’s the only monarchy in southern Europe and southern Europe was particularly affected by the financial crisis,” she said. “I wouldn’t expect it to be reflected in prosperous countries to the north,” she added of the anti-monarchy sentiment.
Juan Carlos projected the impression of “privileged aristocratic life,” Ms. Vincent said. In the rest of Europe “there’s definitely republican feeling, but whether people care enough to push it up the political agenda, I’m rather skeptical.”