The royal treatment is not what it used to be for Juan Carlos I of Spain.
A half century ago, as a young king, he renounced the absolute powers that the dictator Francisco Franco had bestowed upon him as his successor. He set the country on the path to democracy, installing himself as the guarantor of a parliamentary monarchy that has made Spain modern.
But last month, as Spain celebrated the 50th anniversary of that transition and the monarchy he helped restore, Juan Carlos was persona non grata at the main commemoration event. A combination of financial, sex and elephant-hunting scandals had led more than a decade ago to his abdication, then self-exile in Abu Dhabi and a general policy of lying low. His participation at the events was limited to a family lunch back at his old palace. He arrived, and left, early. It has all left him feeling left out, like a birthday boy struck from his own party’s guest list.
“It’s ridiculous that the child doesn’t appear at his baptism,” Juan Carlos, 87, has taken to saying, according to Laurence Debray, the co-author of his new memoir.
A half century after Juan Carlos helped birth and rescue Spanish democracy, and more than a decade after his tragicomic fall, he is hoping for a reconsideration and a resurrection. The memoir, “Reconciliation,” is packed with family grievances, mea culpas and some appreciation for what he calls Franco’s “intelligence and political sense.” He included a rare recounting of the death of his younger brother, killed, he said, by a ricocheting bullet when they played with a gun as teenagers. And there was a fair share of self-aggrandizement — “I gave freedom to the Spanish people” — in the hopes of a return to relevance, and perhaps liquidity.
Ms. Debray said the royal was mostly driven by the feeling that he still had something important to say about what he considered Spain’s dangerous polarization, and about a renewed interest among young Spaniards in the autocracy he rejected.
“For him it is a shock,” Ms. Debray said of polls showing growing favorability for Franco. “He says, ‘Wow.’”
But many critics of the emeritus king are saying, Oy. By all accounts, his son, Felipe VI, the current Spanish king, is not enthusiastic about the comeback. Not “necessary or opportune,” the royal family’s spokeswoman said in response to Juan Carlos’s video promoting the book.
Juan Carlos’s critics view his reappearance as a master class in un-self-awareness. Many see him as not a wise voice of reason but an anachronistic cad who repeatedly betrayed his wife, Queen Sofia. He vexed bodyguards by racing into the night in sports cars or motorcycles. He sailed a boat whose name translated to “Rascal.”
They worry that his open loathing of the progressive government will stir up more polarization, and that his score settling against his son and daughter-in-law, the current Queen Letizia, will deepen divisions in the royal family. The clan has already struggled with investigations for tax fraud, reality show appearances, a public contretemps between the current and former queens, and incessant accusations of adultery. Juan Carlos is re-emerging as a battle line.
Last week, his daughter Elena, who was also dropped from the official royal family by her brother the king, seemed to suggest she was on Team Grandpa by showing up at a Madrid book signing by Ms. Debray.
King Felipe instead has kept his distance. At an event with founding fathers of the transition to democracy at an official commemoration in Parliament last week, he gave only a perfunctory nod to “the proclamation of King Juan Carlos I” that “opened a new stage in our history.”
Some people in the room didn’t think the king’s old man was getting his due.
“In his public life, he was great for Spain and the Spanish people,” Esperanza Aguirre, a countess and grande dame of Spain’s conservative Popular Party, said last month in a Parliament meeting room presided over by King Felipe and his wife and daughters. “Maybe in his private life he has made some mistakes,” she said. “Who doesn’t?”
Juan Carlos certainly kept busy the Spanish intelligence services tasked with tamping down on his scandals. One involved a cabaret performer and former Miss Spain who caused a furor in Spain after saying the king had paid her to give him photographs of their meetings that had been taken surreptitiously by her relative. Another alleged paramour was featured in a documentary, speaking about assignations in a van outside the royal palace. Juan Carlos declined to comment on the first claim and has denied the second.
Still, some Spaniards seem willing to give him a second look.
On the day the memoir was published, Lidia Duran, 30, grabbed a copy in a bookstore that said they were selling briskly. “The truth is I don’t like him,” she said, adding that she preferred his son, King Felipe. “But I’m curious. I want to know his point of view.”
Ms. Debray spent two years with her family in Abu Dhabi, with her young children splashing in Juan Carlos’s pool, trying to capture the perspective of a royal she believes is an overlooked historical figure.
She said she spent weeks speaking with him in French, which he learned as a young child, at a giant table in a big, empty marble house where he listened to flamenco music and ate Spanish staples. She found him hobbled by unsuccessful surgeries stemming from the hip he broke in 2012, while elephant hunting in Botswana with his mistress at the time, Corinna Larsen, who also goes by her German ex-husband’s aristocratic surname, zu Sayn-Wittgenstein.
He was now basically broke, Ms. Debray said, despite having received 65 million euros from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Critics called it a payment for lobbying services, but he described it in the book as “a gift I did not know how to refuse.”
He gave the money to Ms. Larsen. After they split, she took him to court in Britain for harassment, saying he had tried to intimidate her into returning the money. The court later threw out the case, citing a lack of jurisdiction. He “bitterly regrets” the relationship, he wrote in his book, and has denied the claim of harassment.
Ms. Debray said wealthy friends helped him pay all his back taxes amid investigations, since dropped, into possible tax evasion and money laundering. He now lived, she said, off the kindness of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Emirati president.
She said she found him alone, still troubled over the memory of the 14-year-old brother shot and killed in an apparent accident when Juan Carlos was 18, and wracked with guilt about cutting the succession line in front of his father, whom he became choked up when talking about.
He was also deeply sad that the current king acted “like a distant son,” Ms. Debray said, and “would love to have a phone call” with him. The family sent Christmas greetings, she said, but Felipe never sent his granddaughters, including Princess Leonor, the now 20-year-old heir to the crown, to splash in the pool. He also cut off his father’s salary and pension. “‘This announcement means you reject me,’ I told him,” Juan Carlos wrote of that decision.
In Ms. Debray’s close reading of her co-author, Juan Carlos is a man of another century whose outsize appetites were an expression of freedom after he grew up under Franco’s magnifying glass. The dictator, he had told her, had even tweaked him about the bad spelling in his youthful love letters to girlfriends.
But she most wanted the former king, a direct descendant of Louis XIV, to explain how he decided to give up real power.
When Franco died in 1975, leaving Juan Carlos in charge, few took the young king seriously. Many jokingly called him “Juan Carlos the Brief,” expecting him to fade. Instead, by speeding Spain’s transition to civilian rule, he cemented his status as the guarantor of Spanish democracy, and emerged as an actual statesman compared with the ceremonial figureheads who led Europe’s remaining royal courts.
Ms. Debray said the former king told her that he had been planning to give up power years before he even got it, and that he had worked around Franco’s constant surveillance to build a relationship with Communists who he knew would be critical to an eventual transition.
“His obsession was not to have a second civil war,” Ms. Debray said.
When a prominent colonel staged a coup a few years later, in 1981, it took him by surprise, Ms. Debray said. With practically the entire political class held hostage in Parliament and Spaniards hiding in their homes, he stood up to the putsch.
“He was completely alone,” she said.
That remains the case today, she said.
Last week, his son, Felipe, participated in another commemoration in Madrid of the crown’s role in Spain’s democratization. It was held at King Juan Carlos University, but King Juan Carlos was nowhere to be seen.
José Bautista contributed reporting.
Jason Horowitz is the Madrid bureau chief for The Times, covering Spain, Portugal and the way people live throughout Europe.
The post A Former King Seeks an Exit From Exile but Finds No Royal Treatment appeared first on New York Times.
