Juan Carlos’s Fall from Grace in Spain and the Precarious Future of the World’s Monarchies
Whether from the onward march of Western-style secularism and global consumer culture or from public revulsion at the kinds of corruption that social media helps reveal, monarchy seems under increasing threat of extinction.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/juan-carloss-fall-from-grace-in-spain-and-the-precarious-future-of-the-worlds-monarchies
Even after his abdication, however, Juan Carlos—who had retained the title of “Rey Emérito”—continued to live large, jetting around the world to posh resorts owned by ultra-rich friends, and he was often spotted in the company of one or another of his known lovers. (He and Queen Sofía, who is a princess in the unseated Greek royal family, have, by all accounts, been estranged for many years due to Juan Carlos’s chronic infidelities.) There were additional contretemps along the way: In 2017, his son-in-law Iñaki Urdangarin, a former sports star married to his daughter, Princess Cristina, was sentenced to six and a half years in prison after he was found guilty of using a charitable fund as a private slush fund. More recently, it emerged that Juan Carlos had accepted a previously undeclared “gift” of a hundred million dollars from Saudi Arabia’s late King Abdullah—allegedly a bribe in return for his help in arranging a lucrative fast-rail-construction contract.