Stories and challenges of the arrival of the King of Spain in Argentina – 23/03/2019

The visit to Argentina which initiates the King of Spain, Felipe VI (Felipe Juan Pablo Alfonso de Toussaint of Bourbon and Greece) is the seventh of a Spanish monarch almost forty-five years after the return of the monarchy and the Bourbon House to the throne of that country. The precedents were made by his father. Today, King Emeritus Juan Carlos I. Felipe has made several trips to Argentina as Prince of Asturias and even as a crew member of the Juan Sebastián de Elcano training ship, of the Spanish Navy.

The King is 51 years old, measures 1.97, speaks perfectly four languages, Spanish, English, French and Catalan, has a great grandfather who was king since the day of his birth, who abdicated the throne and thus paved the way for the Spanish Republic; he has an English great-grandmother, who was his baptismal godmother; he has a grandfather who must have been king and never was, and a father who reigned in Spain when he was born in Italy. It's a symbol of the hectic and contemporary life of the world bourbons on the throne of Spain which was reached in 1700.

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Alfonso XII He was a Spanish king who died at the age of 27 and was tuberculosis when his wife, Maria Cristina de Absburgo, was three months pregnant. On May 17, 1886, the Sovereign gave birth to a man, Alfonso XIII, king of this moment. At the age of his father's death, Alfonso found a girlfriend in England: it was Maria Eugenia of Battenberg, granddaughter of Queen Victoria. They were married on May 31, 1906 in the church of San Gerónimo de Madrid. Spain has returned to the blood ties that, four centuries ago, Enrique VIII and Catalina de Aragón had drawn. Battenberg (Monte Batten in German) was the family name of the British royal family, in this Europe knotted in the dominating empire, like Queen and Celestina, Queen Victory. After the First World War, which ended the world of blood and Strauss, the British royal family replaced the Battenberg with its English version, Mountbatten. But those who, like Victoria Eugenia, integrated other real houses, continued with native Battenberg.

On the day of the marriage between Alfonso XIII and Victoria Eugenia, when the couple went by carriage to the Royal Palace and the main street, the Catalan anarchist Mateo Morral threw a bomb hidden in a bouquet of flowers. The bomb bounced off the hood of the car and fell backwards: it killed twenty-five people and the entire cavalry fire. The boyfriends left safe and sound, but the queen went to the palace party with her white dress stained with foreign blood.

In the 50s, the genius of Rafael de Leon, on a music of Manuel Pareja Obregón, was going to dedicate a Sevillian to this episode, which saves the beauty of the queen, "She is blonde like wheat when she" is out "of the sun / she has blue eyes like rosemary flower / what looks good / Doña Victoria Eugenia / and Alfonso XIII" and to the stupor of the attack : "And thrills / see your girlfriend / Alfonso XIII".

It was not a happy marriage. Her Majesty's infidelities have made her a queen betrayed. They had seven children, some marked by hemophilia. The penultimate was Juan de Borbón y Battenberg, the man destined to be king and who was not there. In April 1931, with his reign in crisis, the peasantry impoverished the consequences of the Rif war in Morocco, the failure of the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera and Catalan nationalism, the municipal elections urged the king to abdicate and exile, "not to cause a bloodbath" that was to take only five years.

Thus was born the Second Republic of Spain, swept away by the civil war from 1936 to 1939 and buried by four decades of dictatorship in charge of Francisco Franco. Don Juan de Borbón had a tumultuous relationship with Franco: he declared himself a pretender to the throne on the death of his father in 1941 and aspired to rule over a reconciled Spain, while Franco wanted the monarchy to be the continuation of his regime. Married to his cousin Maria de Mercedes of Borbón and Orleans, he had four children: Pilar, Juan Carlos, Margarita and Alfonso. Jean Charles, born in Rome in January 1938, was baptized Juan Carlos Alfonso Víctor María of Borbón y Borbón and, on the death of Franco, on November 20, 1975, he would be in charge of restoring the Spanish bourbon monarchy.

It has not been easy. Franco had named Juan Carlos his successor king in July 1969. And Juan Carlos accepted, which earned him stay away from your father, who rightly considered himself the heir to the crown and refused to give him the dynastic rights that his father, Alfonso XIII, had given him. Father and son had since left, and even when Juan Carlos was already King of Spain. On May 14, 1977, after a first meeting in Madrid the previous year and during an intimate ceremony at the Zarzuela Palace, Don Juan de Borbón, this man son of kings, father of a king and who has never been king, He gave up his dynastic rights in favor of his son: "MajestyShe said, matching All for Spain. Long live Spain. Long live the king"He died in Pamplona on 1 April 1993, at the age of 79.

Juan Carlos I was already a king without obstacles. He had walked for the first time in Spain at the age of ten, thanks to an agreement between his father and Franco that the prince of the time studied on Spanish soil, under the supervision of Caudillo ". He attended military training in Zaragoza, at the Military Naval School of Pontevedra and at the Air Academy of Murcia. He studied political and international law, economics and finance at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 1962, he married Sofía Margarita Victoria Federica from Greece and Denmark. They had three children: Elena in 1963, Cristina in 1965 and Felipe, who is now king, in 1968.

It was a key element of the Spanish transition. Franco had proclaimed that the continuity of his regime was guaranteed: "I leave everything bound and well bound." But no, the world has changed, Europe has changed and Spain is changing. It was not so simple in those dramatic years. Yes, the election made by the king of Adolfo Suarez at the head of the government was crucial in 1976. Suarez, a politician supposed to be a continuitte of the Franco regime, instead led Spain to a democratic openness, towards a plurality of ideas and towards political tolerance. , including the legalization of the Communist Party in this society in which civil war still smoked. In the midst of terrorist attacks perpetrated by ETA and the willingness of the armed forces to return to the old times, Juan Carlos I was the guarantor of democracy, the rule of law and his the figure has gained enormous popularity among the Spaniards.

The attempted coup d'etat led by Lt. Col. Antonio Tejero Civil Guard on February 23, 1981, with the abduction of the entire Spanish government to the Congress of Deputies and Troops and tanks in the streets, and the uncertainty of Madrid and Valencia, the king, already at dawn and dressed in his uniform of supreme commander of the armed forces, made it clear that the Crown had defended the Constitution that the Spaniards had approved by referendum. This late public intervention, as well as the never-failing attempts to get rid of Suarez, the Prime Minister, who had already resigned a few days before the coup attempt, further blurs the understanding and badysis of this historical day.

In November 1978, Juan Carlos whom I visited for the first time in Argentina. It was full military dictatorship, with Jorge Videla as de facto president, with echoes of the World Cup and the quasi-war with Chile on the Beagle, barely mitigated. It was a visit criticized by what appeared to be an endorsement of the Spanish monarchy by the brutal Argentine government, but it was still in the story because, at an official reception, one of the illustrious guests stole his coat from Queen Sofia. A piece of paper that deserved the protest of Spain and the swift action of these military centurions to find the cloak and the thief. They did it.

During the last years of his reign, the popularity of Juan Carlos I weakened under the influence of business extramarital, never very hidden but now seen from a new angle, plus the corruption scandal that enveloped her daughter, the Infanta Cristina, and her husband, Iñaki Urdangarin, plus an elephant hunt with Corinna Larsen, who, presumably, she was also his lover, added to some crown tales that did not close and his health deteriorated, almost burying the king's image and his long reign of nearly four decades. This was not a unique phenomenon in Spain. The world's press which claimed at the time that Juan Carlos I was "one of the most unlikely and inspiring heroes of 20th century freedom" had criticized in 2007 the personal fortune of the monarch and " his luxurious lifestyle, that of a boy ". Juan Carlos I abdicated the throne of his son Felipe on June 19, 2014.

He remains king emeritus, which causes headaches in the cautious protocol of the monarchy. Last December, when the Spanish Constitution was forty years old, the Congress of Deputies recognized it with emotion.

Felipe VI, who visits us for the first time, is the heir to the Bourbon symbology and their names: Philip is the first Bourbon to reign in Spain, Juan is his grandfather Juan, his godfather of baptism with his great-grandmother, Victoria Eugenia, is Pablo of his maternal grandfather, Pablo I of Greece, he is Alfonso of Alfonso XIII and he is De Todos los Santos because that is what dictates the tradition of the Bourbons. He has been married since 2004 to Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano and has two daughters: Leonor de Todos Los Santos of Borbón y Ortiz, heir to the throne and principality of Asturias who belonged to his father, and Sofía de Todos los Santos of Borbón y Ortiz.

Felipe arrives today in Argentina for a state visit to participate in various activities with the president Mauricio Macri and inaugurate the VIII International Congress of the Spanish Language in the city of Córdoba. Tomorrow, they will share a lunch with their wives at La Rosada.

His kingdom is not that of his great-grandfather, he does not even look like his father's. Face, yes, similar dramas: the unemployment, the violence and the terrorism, the economy in crisis, the political corruption, the Secessionist zeal of part of Catalonia, the l & # 39; immigration of those who see in their kingdom a paradise which allows them to flee the hell in which they live and even a certain antimonarchical threat which makes the republican pbadions revive.

The King of Spain, still young, is in age and years of exercise, believes and says, to a parliamentary monarchy "renewed for a new period.We want a Spain in which its citizens recover and maintain the trust in the institutions and a society based on civility and tolerance, honesty and rigor, with an open mind and a spirit of solidarity.We are a great country.We have a great nation. "

Your ancestors they would applaud it.

The visits of the kings of Spain

The visit of Felipe VI is the seventh visit of a Spanish monarch to the country. Before, his father, now emeritus king Juan Carlos I, was in Buenos Aires between 26 and 30 November 1978, under the military dictatorship presided over by Jorge Videla. He returned to the country between 14 and 19 April 1985 and then met with President Raúl Alfonsín. Ten years later, he returned between October 15 and 19, 1995 for the fifth Ibero-American Summit of Presidents and Heads of State meeting in Bariloche. He traveled to Buenos Aires from November 12 to 13, 2003, where he met the then president, Néstor Kirchner, and the following year, from November 16 to 17, 2004, in Rosario to open the Third International Congress. of the Spanish language. His last visit took place from 3 to 4 December 2010 as part of the 20th Ibero-American Summit. He met President Cristina Fernández and her Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva.

Felipe VI arrives in the country, for the first time as King of Spain. He has already done it five times, as Prince of Asturias. The last, in 2010, aims to promote the candidacy of Madrid as venue for the 2020 Olympic Games.