Australia.- This Friday, King Charles III will embark on his first long-term international trip since being diagnosed with cancer in February, with stops in Australia y Samoa.
Accompanied by his wife, Queen Camillaand a medical team, the 75-year-old monarch will visit these two Oceanian countries between October 18 and 26, amid a growing anti-monarchy movement in Australia, where he is still head of state.
During your stay in Samoa, Carlos III He will attend a meeting of the Commonwealth, being head of state of 14 members of the 56 of this commonwealth of countries that mostly share historical ties with the United Kingdom.
The displacement of the royal couple may relaunch the debate on the future of the monarchy in Australia, where there are many supporters of a republican system.
Anti-monarchist groups have been selling products in Australia these days, such as t-shirts, with republican slogans of what they have dubbed the “farewell tour” of the sovereign.
Graham Smith, head of the British group Republic, is also in Australia planning protests.
A YouGov institute poll last year showed one in three Australians support becoming a republic as soon as possible and a similar number want to remain a monarchy.
Reparations for slavery
The tour also comes amid calls for reparations for slavery by leaders of Caribbean member countries of the Commonwealth, mostly former British colonies.
Before the Samoa meeting, Barbadian Hilary Beckles, president of the Caribbean Community Reparations Commission (Caricom), announced that his organization will persist in its strategy of convening a summit to “work on what a model of justice should be like.” “reparative.”
After the announcement of his cancerCarlos III It resumed its public activities at the end of April.
This trip will, since then, be the sovereign’s second abroad, after having attended the commemorations of the Normandy Landings in France in June, which marked the beginning of the end of the Second World War.
When he was Prince, the monarch traveled to Australia on several occasions, but it is the first time he has gone since his accession to the throne in September 2022, automatically becoming head of state of this country.
His visit also marks the first by a British monarch to Australia since 2011, when his mother, Elizabeth II, who died in 2022, traveled to the country.
Among the topics to be discussed by the King, during his stay in Canberrathe Australian capital, there will be projects on environmental protection and the impact of climate change.
Commonwealth Summit
Charles III will later meet in Sydney, Australia’s most populous city, with two experts in the treatment of melanoma, Georgina Long and Richard Scolyer, in a country that has one of the highest levels of skin cancer in the world.
After his stay in Australia, the sovereign will attend the meeting of heads of government of the 56 countries of the Commonwealth in Samoa, the October 25 and 26being the first one he goes to as King.
The meeting will serve to elect a new Secretary General of the Commonwealth, replacing the British Patricia Scotland, who has held the position since 2016.
The three candidates for his succession, the Gambian Mamadou Tangara, Ghanaian Shirley Botchwey and Lesotian Joshua Setipa have spoken out in favor of reparations for slavery.
At first there was talk that the tour would also include New Zealand, But the state of health of the monarch, undergoing treatment for the cancer he suffers from, made the trip lighter.
