Not so long ago, the boos that echoed around Vitoria’s Buesa Arena on the arrival of King Juan Carlos for the basketball Copa del Rey final at the weekend would have surprised many Spaniards and scandalised quite a few others. Such an open display of hostility towards the monarch would have been almost unthinkable. And yet on Sunday, when the booing was so loud that the playing of the national anthem ahead of the game between Barcelona and Valencia was cut short, it no longer seemed all that surprising or shocking, such is the sliding esteem of the Spanish royal family. The most defining moment of the reign of Juan Carlos now looks so far away it could be from another era. In 1981, the … [Read more...] about Spain’s King Juan Carlos seeks to stem the opprobrium
spanish royal family
King Juan Carlos
2012 was the year that some of Spain’s most revered and powerful institutions lost their aura. Crisis hit the country’s banking sector, once seen as among the strongest in the world and the already unpopular judiciary was further discredited by a scandal affecting the president of the Supreme Court, Carlos Dívar. Even the royal family could not escape the wave of opprobrium. A scandal linking King Juan Carlos’s son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, to an embezzlement scam dragged on without resolution, at times threatening to sully the name of Princess Cristina. And in April, as Spain’s borrowing costs soared and the economic crisis reached a new peak, it was revealed that Juan Carlos himself had … [Read more...] about King Juan Carlos