Spain's Juan Carlos I offers cautionary tale for Charles III
MADRID (AP) — A playboy past that was once brushed under the carpet, a popular son whose telegenic family threatens to eclipse his own star, and endless leaks about his private life: Spain’s Juan Carlos I can empathize with the lot of Britain’s Charles III.
The former Spanish head of state abdicated in disgrace in 2014. His story serves as a warning for any European royal who wants their achievements on the throne, rather than torrid gossip, to be their lasting legacy.
“What he lives is sex, money and power, the three dimensions of all the problems of humankind,” said Álvaro de Cózar, an investigative journalist who wrote and directed “Ex-Rey” (Ex-King) a popular podcast that delved into the 85-year-old Juan Carlos’ troubled life. “It’s a very Shakespearean plot.”
The former king has become an object of open hostility in some quarters of Spanish society following his recent second visit home from exile in Abu Dhabi. Gone are the days of a pliant press covering up his long history of affairs and indiscretions, as some even ask whether it is time for Spain's third republic of the past 150 years.
Juan Carlos I will not attend Charles III's coronation, the Spanish royal house has confirmed, and a publicly announced lunch with the British monarch last month was quietly dropped.
Charles' own family drama also threatens to overshadow the event, with his younger son’s tell-all autobiography crowning decades of tabloid divulgences about his siblings and the difficulties of his own two marriages.
Juan Carlos' relations with the Spanish public began to crack in 2012, when the former patron of the World Wide Fund for Nature injured himself on an elephant hunting trip in Botswana while his subjects back home were living through a full-blown economic crisis.
This was echoed last...