The expression ’embarrassment in Sanxenxo’, used in a tweet by Carmen Calvo, the former Vice President of the Government, to allude elliptically to the arrival of Juan Carlos de Borbón in Galicia, summarizes the sentiment of many citizens. It is not about the return of the king emeritus in itself, controversial but legitimate and humanly understandable, but about the form that it has taken and the conditions that he has not previously fulfilled. Without the monarch having offered explanations for the serious events that forced him to go abroad and with an agenda that begins with an arrival by private jet and a regatta. As if nothing happened. As if it were one more visit than he used to make to Mallorca or Barcelona, when he reigned, to get on the yacht ‘Bribón’ and sail with his friends. It is true that Juan Carlos does not have any pending case before a Spanish court and that the Supreme Court Prosecutor’s Office has considered that some of the crimes in which he had allegedly incurred have prescribed or were covered by the inviolability that protected him while he served as head of the Condition. However, the king emeritus cannot ignore, due to the knowledge he is supposed to have of the monarchical institution and of the political situation, that this return, after 650 days spent in Abu Dhabi, has deep implications for the credibility of the institution that one day incarnated.
If Juan Carlos had put forward the need not to add firewood to an already polarized political landscape, and the defense of the monarchy that he heads Philip VI Since he abdicated, he would not have started his visit to Spain with a festive act like the one in Sanxenxo, enveloped in the dubious smell of crowds and surrounded by unconditional supporters who were waiting for him at the port’s dock. To whom he has been the representative of the highest Spanish institution for almost four decades other behavior could be required. More discreet, presided over by humility and assuming the seriousness of the events that he has been involved in in recent decades – regardless of whether some have prescribed – and that still have him pending a hearing before the British justice system.
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The unpublished images of Sanxenxo have been quite the opposite. Accompanied by his daughter, the infanta Elena, the king emeritus has tried to return as if nothing had happened. As if the more than six hundred days in Abu Dhabi were a parenthesis, when they are not, and not only because of his announced declaration of returning to the Arab emirates, after his short stay in Spain, and continuing to reside there.
On Monday, Juan Carlos has scheduled the last and most delicate stage of his visit: the meeting with his family at the Zarzuela Palace. It would have been reasonable to begin by seeing King Felipe VI after such a long absence, and only the tensions that have existed in the preparation of a trip that neither Moncloa nor the Royal House saw favorably they explain the nonsense of starting with a regatta in Galicia. However, if Juan Carlos wants to continue contributing to Spanish stability and democracy – as he did on notable occasions during the first years of his term – he must make this meeting of the royal family an act of recognition of the new stage that your child strives to open for the Spanish monarchy. A stage marked by transparency, accountability and social responsibility of the monarchy and its representatives. Quite the opposite of what Juan Carlos I has been doing. To do this, the emeritus king must leave the bubble in which he lives and that has taken him to Sanxenxo, not feed the image that ‘the King is not sent nobody’, which is as much as claiming the climate that surely led him to act as he did, and accepting that his conduct is disapproved by a very significant part of the political forces and of Spanish and international public opinion.