Beset by mishaps while on hunting trips and rumours of extramarital flings, the latter years of King Juan Carlos I of Spain resemble that of many of Europe’s royals in the tabloid age. But beyond the occasional headlines in Spain’s prensa rosa – or red-top newspapers – he will be remembered for skilfully transiting his land from backward military dictatorship to modern European state.
With Spain bitterly divided in the post-war years between Republicans and Fascists, the young monarch faced hostile generals on the Right and contemptuous Communists on the Left, and was widely expected to end up as “Juan Carlos the Brief”. Instead, as his 38 years on the throne was to prove, he played a key role in smoothing Spain’s path to democracy, deftly courting allies on both sides and almost single-handedly thwarting a military coup in 1981.
Tall, good-looking, and possessed of a certain common touch, the king’s long-standing popularity belies the fact that he came to rule in a country where monarchs could not assume a quiet life of public engagements and backstage diplomacy. When he was born in Rome, Italy, in January 1938, his family were already living in exile, following elections in 1931 that backed the anti-monarchists of Spain’s Republican movement.
Francisco Franco, the Fascist general who then took power during Spain’s civil war, was happy to have the royal household restored, but only as a figurehead to his own absolutist rule. As such, rather than nominating Juan’s father, Juan de Borbon, as king, Franco skipped a generation and named Juan Carlos instead, expecting the young prince to be a more malleable figure than his liberal-leaning parent.
Indeed, such was the kingmaker’s confidence that Juan Carlos would pose no challenge to his regime that Franco even nominated him as his own successor, amid pressure from other hardliners who saw an absolute monarchy as a bulwark against the Left. Juan Carlos duly swore loyalty to Franco’s government in 1969, and to the dismay of the country’s left, gave all the outward appearance of a man who would uphold the generalissimo’s regime beyond his death, regularly appearing alongside him in state functions.
From that point onwards, Juan Carlos, a blood relative of Britain’s Queen Victoria and France’s Louis XIV, might have hoped to revert to the kind of duties more familiar to his counterparts in Britain and Europe, mixing royal engagements with his passions for skiing, hunting and yachting.
But in early 1981, he was thrust back into the centre of political life when a group of disgruntled army officers attempted to seize power. Unhappy at the role Spain’s new parliament had been given in the running of the country, they assumed that Juan Carlos would actually back them. They were wrong.
Drawing on contacts that he had cultivated during his own armed forces training in the 1950s, Juan Carlos telephoned key officers to voice his opposition to the coup, and refused to take calls from those hoping to change his mind. Dressed in his uniform as Captain-General of the Spanish armed forces, he then gave a television broadcast calling for democratic government to be upheld, effectively scuppering the coup.
It was a move that won him the support even of Spain’s communist leader, Santiago Carrillo, the man who had dubbed him Carlos the Brief. As Mr Carrillo put it: “Today, we are all monarchists.”
The next quarter-century helped seal the King’s popularity, with few of the gaffes and rows that dogged his counterparts in Britain. Frugal by royal standards, he shunned the opulent Palacio Real, remaining in the more modest Zarzuela Palace outside Madrid and trimming budgets for royal courtiers. He also cultivated a certain everyman appeal, broadcasting as a radio ham and riding incognito around Spain on his motorbike.
That latter pastime sparked many stories – possibly urban legends – of fellow bikers unexpectedly receiving royal assistance when broken down on lonely roads.
Most importantly for his image, though, the private life of the man hailed as the saviour of new, democratic Spain was also seen as off-limits to the country’s newly-free press. Rumours of his occasional womanising and disco-crawling were simply seen as the legitimate pursuits of a good-looking, charismatic monarch.
Instead, his approval ratings of up to 80 per cent – far higher than most European royals – reflected a sense of general content in Spain as it moved from an ex-dictatorship where many areas lacked roads or running water into one of Europe’s more prosperous and liberal states, with strong feminist and gay rights movements. Juan Carlos himself won praise from the gay rights lobby when he backed a gay marriage bill introduced in 2005.
Only in more recent years has the royal star begun to wane, with the king facing particular criticism when he broke his hip during an elephant-hunting trip in Botswana in 2012.
Quite aside from a chorus of disapproval from animal rights campaigners, the expensive, privately-funded safari came as his subjects bore the brunt of austerity cuts caused by the Eurozone crash. The king was also accompanied by Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, a German aristocrat who was said to have an “intimate friendship” with him, although she later claimed he was simply a friend. (PIX) By then, polls showed that 62 per cent of Spaniards were in favour of Juan Carlos abdicating.
Nonetheless, when Spain’s prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, finally announced the abdication on Monday, he made a point of hailing it as “proof of the maturity of our democracy.” For whatever problems may have beset Juan Carlos in recent years, few would argue that without him, Spain’s young democracy might never grown up in the first place.
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