MIAMI, United States. — After a dignified and orderly monarchy of more than 70 years, the English queen chose to die at 96. She did not want to risk another interview like Oprah’s. Her son will reign with the name of Carlos III, but it will not be the same. Elizabeth II gets the affection and respect of most of her subjects. Carlos III will have to win them over and that is very difficult. Finally, she was buried at Windsor Castle, near her parents, George VI and Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, her flighty sister Margaret, and her husband, Philip of Edinburgh, decorated as a hero during World War II, who had the fine courtesy of dying in 2021, aged 99, eighteen months before his regal wife.
Jorge Luis Borges’ mother also died at the age of 99. An acquaintance of hers told her that she was a pity that she had not lived to a hundred. “I don’t think so,” the Buenos Aires writer replied. “Why?”, the surprised interlocutor continued to inquire. “Because I never saw that devotion to the decimal metric system,” replied Borges, who did not miss an opportunity to make an ingenious phrase.
Farouk of Egypt, in the golden exile that he lived through, went down in the annals of the butades. He said, wistfully, that “soon there would be five kings left. The 4 of the deck and the English”. But it wasn’t true. It is necessary to discard, according to Ipsos, at least for now, the 4 of the deck. Farouk was breathing through the wound. He had been overthrown by Lieutenant Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1952 and forced to leave his homeland within six hours. By the time his blue eyes closed for the last time, he was, of course, in an Italian restaurant. He was the thickest former monarch in history. He weighed 140 kilos, more than 300 pounds. Obviously, he left shortly after turning 45 as a result of a heart attack. He died struck down by a plate of spaghetti bolognese. It is the only case recorded in history.
The numbers of Ipsos Global Advisor, Although they show that only 15% think that the United Kingdom would be better off without the monarchy, the rest of the European Royal Houses also have very important support. Only 17% oppose the Belgian monarchy and 22% the Swedish one. I suspect the Dutch, Danes and Norwegians are in between those two digits. Why do I think so? Because the cost of having a symbolic representation of the nation is very low. (By the way, only 4% of Japanese people think that the monarchy should be abolished, but we already know that the Japanese are different).
Like the Spanish… but on the other side. The same survey, carried out in 28 countries, shows that 52% of Spaniards think that the monarchy should be voted for, including one in four members of the Popular Party, from the conservative right, but only 37% of the electorate would vote against it. . There you have to count almost all of Left united and 80% of Can. (More than half of Spaniards are in favor of the monarchy).
The Spanish understand that Felipe VI is not like his father. I want to say: it has nothing to do with the moral character of Juan Carlos, lately very punished in the three-episode HBO series “Operation: Save the King.” Felipe is an absolutely honest king, and Letizia, the queen, is a modern and enlightened middle-class woman, a university student, the pride of the country. Letizia has done everything possible to educate Princess Leonor so that she fulfills her duties as queen when it is her turn to replace her father. I believe that the girl speaks, in addition to Spanish, English and French, the key international languages, Catalan and Galician -the other two Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula-, while she defends herself with Basque, the difficult primordial language of many Basques. Leonor, like Letizia, will be, if she comes to reign, a ‘progressive’ monarch in the best sense of that word, almost always assimilated to the nations that make the least progress.
The best way to protect the Spanish monarchy is to legislate that, every 15 or 20 years, a new generation undergoes the ceremony to vote whether or not they want the institution of monarchs. That would save the country a lot of blood. After all, three times the Bourbon dynasty has had to abandon power and go into exile. (The King Emeritus himself, Juan Carlos, was born in exile in Rome.) Change has never been free. It is time for that to change.
OPINION ARTICLE
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