In the last few weeks, Catalonian nationalist groups have shown their dislike of the king of Spain by burning his photo in the streets. The monarch has also been criticized by the Spanish Right for his reluctance to defend Spain’s unity in the face of Catalonian separatists, who today are allies of the Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s leftist government. So, is the Spanish monarchy at risk?

 

In 1939, Spain became a dictatorship, similar to the one in fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, Francisco Franco had nothing to do with Mussolini or Hitler – ideologically speaking. The Spanish general was a military man of the old school, forged in a colonial war in North Africa, of bourgeois extraction, Catholic beliefs and monarchist credentials. For that reason, although Franco imitated fascist ideology, organic democracy and the one-party system endured by Italy and Germany, when having to decide Spain’s fate on his deathbed, the dictator decided the country would become a monarchy. Not a monarchy, however, like Italy’s, in which the king was nothing more than a decorative figure and submissive to the dictator. Rather, a monarchy with a king able to exert real power and with real capacity to take part in the country’s political life.

 

When Franco had to decide who would succeed him as king, he was faced with a serious problem. As a genuine monarchist, he believed in dynastic legitimacy. Accordingly, the only legitimate person to be king of Spain after Franco’s death was Don Juan de Borbón, son and heir of the last king of Spain, Alfonso XIII. However, if he were to make this designation, precisely because it was based on a monarchist-dynastic legitimacy, it would have meant a challenge to Franco’s own legitimacy as winner of the Civil War. Franco did not wish to step down as head of State, because he intended to stay as such until his death. For that reason, in order to be faithful to his monarchic ideology without putting in danger his own power, he chose Don Juan’s son, Don Juan Carlos, grandson of Alfonso XIII. In this way, the dynastic legitimacy was somehow respected (since Don Juan Carlos would have also ended as king when succeeding his father, Don Juan) without casting any doubts on Franco’s position.

 

Naturally, the influential Spanish monarchic minority rejected this designation because they considered it contrary to the dynastic order, but they were not able to impose their criteria due to Franco’s enormous authority among Spaniards supporting his regime.

 

Father and son tacitly decided to share roles so, one way or another, the monarchy would be actually reinstated in Spain after Franco’s death. While Don Juan Carlos devoted himself to win the confidence of those regime sectors that would uphold him after the dictator’s death (keep in mind that they were not monarchic), Don Juan, the father whose succession rights were ignored, dedicated his time to flatter the Spanish Left (not monarchic, either) that opposed the regime from overseas.

 

In 1975, when the dictator passed away, Juan Carlos I succeeded him as king. With great ability, he took steps toward turning Spain into a real democracy, and he did so in a way that Franco’s living remnants presented only scant resistance to that process – the most serious event was an attempted coup d'etat on February 23, 1981, something that the king quashed in less than twenty-four hours.

 

The Right, most of which did not feel genuinely monarchic, endorsed Juan Carlos because they thought that would lead Spain towards democracy, essential if he were to avoid endangering the most valued treasures inherited from the Franco era: social stability, affluence and the country’s unity. The Left, that from the beginning felt apprehensive about the monarch, ended up trusting him when it realized through its electoral victory in 1982, that the democracy reinstated by Juan Carlos was for real, and that it allowed the Left to win free held elections.

 

The Constitution of 1978 included guarantees for all. The Right saw how the monarchy was definitively reinstated as a guarantor of Spain’s unity. The Left saw how a real restored democracy would allow them to win elections and be able to develop authentic leftist policies. Even the nationalists were pleased at the possibility that the Spanish regions would enjoy a large amount of autonomy.

 

In the meantime, in 1977, when it was evident that sharing roles was no longer necessary as during Franco’s life, Don Juan renounced his claim to all his dynastic rights to the throne in favor of his son. This act enabled the Spanish monarchic minority to be totally loyal to the king, once the arisen dynastic conflict as a result of Franco’s designation was solved.

 

Once rid of that problem, Juan Carlos was aware that he had nothing to fear from the Right, that he could only be subject to attacks coming from the still republican Left and from nationalists wishing to get total independence for their regions. For that reason, Juan Carlos always tried to have a good relationship with them, in defiance of the Right, with whom he did not have to be accommodating in order to count on its endorsement.

 

In effect, during the years of Socialist government (1982-1996), one could see the king comfortable in his role as head of State with almost no effective responsibilities of government. In the same fashion, he did not stop flattering the nationalists, convinced that the more threatened the unity of Spain was, the more necessary his presence would be to preserve it. However, during the years in which the Right was in power (1996-2004), Don Juan Carlos’s relations with the government of José María Aznar were not good. It is suspected that some leaders on the right showed their displeasure because of the monarch’s rather obscure financial operations making him vulnerable to be blackmailed by a never-declared monarchist Left. There is no certainty about all this except that, in 1975, Don Juan Carlos was one of the poorest kings on the planet and today he has a fortune according to his position. On the other hand, Aznar reduced the king’s international role – traditionally much more pro-Arab than the then-president and due to his personal and financial bonds – an act that provoked an ill-concealed displeasure in the Royal House. 

 

In 2004, after the Islamist attack on 3/11, when the Left grabbed power again – this time under the Socialist leadership of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero –  it presented a change of strategy: It sought an alliance with the most radical nationalists to make concessions that they would never get from a rightist government. The idea was to show the nationalists that only the Left would pay heed to their claims. Moreover, that it was in their own interest to indefinitely support a leftist government in Madrid whatever the election results may be. It would mean to isolate the Right out of power until the improbable moment that the Right could win an election with an absolute majority – an unusual feat accomplished only once in 2000 by the Right, when the Left went through a serious crisis. 

 

The two most important concessions, with which Zapatero wanted to demonstrate his willingness to go where the Right never would, were: First, the approval of a new statute for Catalonia, recognizing rights to this region that, besides being unconstitutional, are even unthinkable in a federal state (among other rights, the State’s obligation to invest a fixed percentage of GDP in the region and the right of Catalonia to intervene in Spain’s foreign policy); and second, starting a negotiation with the Basque terrorist organization ETA in order to offer a solution similar to Catalonia’s – something close to total independence, in exchange for laying down its arms.

 

This policy, although meant to expose the isolation of the Right due to its supposed inability to reach agreements with the nationalists, has actually been criticized by some sectors of the Left, too, because it is putting Spain’s unity in danger. It is so much so that, a minority section of the Socialists has split off to start a new party that also is an enemy of the nationalists – although it is of a leftist persuasion. 

While the Socialist leader was developing this policy of concessions, a sector of the right-wing press has been very critical of the king for not using his great authority to restrain Zapatero’s generosity with the nationalists. Again, the suspicion has arisen that the king has not done it because if he does, he runs the risk that the leftist government would filter compromising details about his financial activities to the press. For that reason, the boldest have dared to suggest that the best way to solve the problem is that Don Juan Carlos abdicates in favor of his son, Felipe, who is untarnished and cannot be blackmailed, and therefore meets all the requirements to present an effective resistance to the policies threatening to fracture Spain. A fracture that, on the other hand, is perceived by the Spanish general public as much more likely in light of what happened in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and now Belgium.

 

The close proximity to the general election set for March 2008 has produced two opposite effects. On the one hand, the government has stopped further negotiations with ETA and the Catalonian statute has been left in dry dock while the Constitutional Court decides about its constitutionality. In this manner, the government is trying to prevent the feeling of uneasiness from seizing the most dynamic sectors of society, including the conformists living in rural southern Spain because they turn out to vote in droves for the Left. In any case, nothing really serious and irreversible has happened yet.

 

On the other hand, the nationalist parties, seeing a leftist government grant so many important concessions, have been forced to increase their demands to show their electorate that they are not content with what Madrid has offered them. Thus, the head of the Basque autonomous region government has warned that he will start a political process in October 2008, the purpose of which is to obtain the independence of the Basque Country. Catalonia’s Vice President, leader of a separatist-minded Republican Party, has announced that Catalonia will obtain its independence in 2014. This announcement has been garnished with street demonstrations in Catalonia massively burning photos of the king — an act that is considered a felony in Spain.

 

Those punishable acts have provoked, for the first time, a reaction from the king defending the institution he represents. In fact, these are not acts directed either against his person or against the monarchic institution, but instead an attempt to attack Spain’s unity, a unity incarnated by the king. Be it to expose the fact that the regions are capable of obtaining full independence and do not want to keep anything from Spain, not even the monarchy – as perhaps Don Juan Carlos had hoped at some moment – or be it for other reasons, the fact is that those acts, specifically aimed personally against him, have awakened the king’s zeal. The Right has greeted it with joy, although it had wished for an earlier regal reaction. However, the left wing closest to power has blamed the Right for trying to monopolize the king’s image, and taking good advantage of some threats against Spain’s unity, something this faction considers simple exaggerations to make them look more serious than what they really are. 

 

Under these conditions, the king – vulnerable or not to be blackmailed –has no other choice than to position himself leading that majority of Spaniards – from the right and the left wishing that Spain continues being what it has been for five hundred years, one nation, without losing any territory.  This reaction will necessarily lead to constitutional reforms in order to strengthen the structure of the State, and also to a change in the Socialist leadership where new people should arrive to confront the separatist demands. In both processes, once initiated, the king should not be involved. However, he does have the obligation to stimulate the first steps leading to them. If Don Juan Carlos does not do it because he persists in not getting involved, whatever the result of the crisis turns out to be, the monarchic institution will be in danger: if Spain breaks apart, the monarchy’s existence will stop making sense; and if the Right, getting the support of one part of the Left, manages to prevent it without the monarch’s aid, it will become self-evident that the monarchy does not serve the last objective for which it was reinstated: To protect Spain’s unity. One should not forget that there are very few monarchists in Spain. Therefore, the enormous endorsement this institution has enjoyed until now is based on the perception of having been useful. If that perception vanishes, because the king allows Spain to break apart or because he does not help prevent it, that endorsement will melt away.

 

That the king has understood that this is the way forward is demonstrated by two recent events. On the one hand, he recently visited Ceuta and Melilla, two towns in northern Africa which have been Spanish for more than three hundred years; as king, he previously had never visited these sites in order to avoid a diplomatic conflict with Morocco. On the other hand, there is the recent conflict with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who insulted Aznar by calling him “fascist”. This latest episode is particularly remarkable because, although the visit to Ceuta and Melilla was expressly approved by the Socialist government, the Chávez incident was a direct result of Zapatero’s affection for Chávez.

 

In fact, after having reported that the king’s reaction towards Chávez had been agreed with Zapatero, and when it became known that things had not been that way, the leftwing newspaper El País harshly criticized the already famous “Why don’t you shut up?!”; the daily considered it overstepping the mark of royal functions, causing a diplomatic conflict that the democratically elected government of Spain would have preferred to avoid.

 

In any case, both gestures were applauded by the social base that sustains the monarchy in Spain and have dissipated for now, the threats to the institution from the Right. Nevertheless, it increases the risk of provoking the republicanism of the radical Spanish Left, which tends to be sympathetic to Moroccan claims with respect to Ceuta and Melilla and, above all, sympathetic to Chávez and his revolution.

 

Emilio Campmany is Senior Fellow for International Law at the Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group.