It may not have been a Spanish court ceremony, but it was very befitting: Spain’s King Felipe VI. was received with military honors by Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen at Vienna’s Hofburg on Monday afternoon. A meeting and lunch followed. In the late afternoon, after commemorating the victims of National Socialism, the royal couple opened the art exhibition “Dalí – Freud. An Obsession” in the Belvedere.
The Hofburg has a special connotation in connection with the royal visit. It was formerly the residence of the Austrian Habsburg Emperors, who left their mark in Spain as “los Austrias” from the 15th century. With a clever marriage policy, they extended their influence to large parts of Europe. Ultimately, the “Casa de Austria” ruled over Spain for almost two centuries. In the 16th century, under Emperor Charles V, Spain was part of the Habsburg Empire “on which the sun never set”.
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Official relations between Austria and Spain have also been very close at times in the recent past: after the end of the dictatorship of Generalísimo Francisco Franco in 1975, Spain once again became a parliamentary hereditary monarchy. The first trip abroad by the then 40-year-old King Juan Carlos I – the father of the current king – then led to Austria in 1978, not least because of the common history.
Welcome breather
In 2007 Juan Carlos was the last time a Spanish monarch was in Austria. Together with the then Federal President Heinz Fischer, he opened the headquarters of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) in Palais Palffy-Erdödy. In 2014 Juan Carlos abdicated in favor of his son Felipe Juan Pablo Alfonso de Todos los Santos de Borbón y Grecia, as his full name is.
Nor is it Van der Bellen’s first meeting with King Felipe. In October 2019, the two sat at a table in Japan’s capital Tokyo at dinner when the new “Tenno”, Emperor Naruhito, ascended the chrysanthemum throne. At the beginning of December of the same year there was a reunion in Madrid. On the occasion of the 25th UN Climate Change Conference, the two heads of state held talks on bilateral relations and the climate crisis. In mid-April 2020, the two spoke on the phone to exchange views on the situation at the time in the corona crisis in both countries and in Europe. This will probably also be an issue this time.
The trip to Vienna could also be a pleasant breather for Spain’s King Felipe VI, who celebrated his 54th birthday on Sunday, and his wife Letizia (49). Because in Spain things are not going well for the monarchy. Above all, the constant scandals surrounding former king Juan Carlos I and his son-in-law Iñaki Urdangarin have been a burden on the image of the crown for years.
Felipe tried to correct the image
Since his accession to the throne in 2014, King Felipe has been trying to restore the tarnished reputation of the monarchy, above all with more transparency around the royal family’s business and income. He stripped his sister Cristina and her husband Iñaki Urdangarin, who was sentenced to five years in prison in 2018 for tax evasion, among other things, of the duke’s title of Palma and officially excluded them from the royal family. Since then, Felipe has disclosed the income of the crown and reduced his salary himself. Members of the royal family are also no longer allowed to accept gifts.
In the collective consciousness, however, the financial and personal affairs of his father, who has been in exile in Abu Dhabi for a year and a half, are negatively anchored. He used to be quite popular: Juan Carlos Alfonso Víctor María de Borbón y Borbón-Dos Sicilias had been designated as head of state during the lifetime of the dictator Francisco Franco, who ruled until 1975, but he subsequently presented himself as one of the guarantors of the ” Transición”, i.e. the relatively smooth transition of Spain into a democracy. During an attempted coup d’état by the Francoist military in February 1981, he put the putschists in their place as commander-in-chief of the army and as a result achieved a high reputation among large parts of the population.
But at the latest since he was caught with his lover Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein on a luxury safari in Botswana in the middle of the terrible financial and economic crisis and photos with an elephant he had killed have been circulating, most Spaniards have lost his bonus. In addition, numerous corruption and bribery affairs became known.
Felipe as “Defender of the Unity of Spain”
Another scandal is currently cooking. Felipe’s older sister Infantin Cristina (56) and the former handball world star and lawyer Iñaki Urdangarin announced the end of their marriage on Monday after more than 24 years and four children together. “By mutual consent, we have decided to end our marital relationship,” it said. Previously, an obvious love affair of Urdangarin had been exposed.
Infanta Cristina still lives in the shared apartment in Geneva, where the two fled in 2010 when the “Nóos” corruption case became known. Urdangarin was sentenced to almost six years in prison in the 2018 affair for embezzlement of six million euros in tax money, forgery of documents, money laundering and fraud, but he is now conditionally released. The sister of the current king was accused of aiding and abetting tax fraud, but was eventually acquitted. However, it was the first time in the history of the Spanish monarchy that a member of the royal family stood before the cadi.
With headlines like this, it’s not easy for Felipes to polish the crown’s standing, despite the glamor factor of his wife Letizia, who used to have a career as a TV presenter. In addition, there are headwinds from several directions on the Iberian Peninsula. For his clear defense of the unity of Spain, the king as head of state makes enemies in separatist circles in Catalonia. “In the end, the constitution will prevail against those who want to disrupt coexistence,” he said, for example, about the illegal independence referendum of 2017.
“The royal couple and the monarchy, as a symbol of Spanish unity, are a red rag for the separatists ruling in Catalonia,” explains political scientist Pablo Simon in an interview with APA in the run-up to the trip to Vienna. King Felipe is always trying to improve the relationship between Spain and Catalonia. Felipe is fluent in Catalan. He was Prince of Girona, Catalonia’s Separatist stronghold. A title that daughter Leonor now wears as crown princess. But for die-hard separatists, Felipe’s ancestors are the reason why they still can’t be independent to this day. It was the Bourbone Felipe V who was able to assert himself in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714 against the Habsburgs, on whose side the Catalans also fought.
The kings are also not particularly popular with some pro-independence nationalists in the Basque Country and Galicia. And since the Socialists have been in power in Spain with the republican left-wing populists from Unidas Podemos, there have also been harsher tones in Madrid. Influenced by the financial and corruption scandals of Felipe’s father Juan Carlos, even Spain’s socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has spoken out in favor of abolishing the king’s legal immunity.
The head of the Spanish Socialists (PSOE) said he wanted to “start a debate on updating the constitution”. Inviolability is no longer up-to-date “in a democracy that has been consolidated after more than 40 years”. One of the harshest critics of the monarchy is Unidas Podemos, the junior partner of the Socialists in the governing coalition. You are openly in favor of abolishing the parliamentary monarchy as a form of government. (apa)
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