Spain’s ex-king quits public life after parade row
SPAIN’S former king, Juan Carlos de Borbón, will spend the first day of his retirement from public life today enjoying the sunshine at a bullfight south of Madrid, exactly five years after his reign ended in abdication and scandal.
As emeritus king since his son, Felipe, took up the throne, 81-year-old Juan Carlos has endured a series of humiliations as ill health and disclosures about his private life have seen him shunted in and out of the spotlight.
According to reports, Juan Carlos was piqued after planning to accompany King Felipe VI at the annual armed forces day in Seville, only for his son and Queen Letizia to decide this was not a good idea.
Quite unexpectedly, last Monday Juan Carlos wrote in a letter to Felipe VI saying that it was time to “start a new chapter in my life and complete my retirement from public life”.
Juan Carlos kicked off the changes that created modern Spain by swearing allegiance to Francisco Franco before launching a democratic transition after the dictator’s death in 1975. This year, his absence from public life has been increasingly conspicuous.
He must now hope that history remembers him as the architect of Spain’s transition to modernity, and not as a flawed and corrupt playboy monarch.
Last year, a recording of Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, described by Spanish media as Juan Carlos’s “intimate friend”, emerged in which the German socialite claimed the old king had used her as a signatory on secret overseas funds. The royal household did not respond to the claims.
It was the disclosure of his relationship with Ms zu Sayn-Wittgenstein that led to Juan Carlos’s initial fall from grace. In 2012, with the Spanish economy in crisis, it emerged that the king had broken his hip while on a secret trip to Botswana to hunt elephants in the company of his female friend.
Juan Carlos and his wife, Queen Sofia, have made little attempt to conceal their estrangement since.
Worse was to follow, however, with the conviction and jailing of Iñaki Urdangarin, the former king’s son-in-law, who had traded on his royal connections to pocket fraudulent consulting contracts with Spanish regional governments.
Cristina de Borbón, Juan Carlos’s youngest daughter, was acquitted after the 2015 trial, in which emails from Urdangarin asking for help from the king were aired. It was that case – and plummeting public support for the monarchy – that ultimately prompted his abdication.
Juan Carlos has also endured physical problems, but few believe it is health that has led the old lion to finally lie down. “To me, it sounded like a case of fire yourself before you get fired,” Pilar Urbano, a journalist, said.