Photo: Princess Cristina and her husband, Inaki Urdangarin, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in 2011.

Stephen Cook: Accusations of tax fraud and money-laundering are only the latest headache for Spain’s monarchy…

By Nate Rawling, Time – January 8, 2013 | Thanks to Golden Age of Gaia.

http://tinyurl.com/ldlufd3

Spain’s Princess Cristina arrives to attend a funeral mass for Juan Antonio Samaranch at Barcelona’s cathedral, April 22, 2010.

Jan. 7 was not a good day for the Spanish royal family. After a lengthy investigation, Princess Cristina, the younger daughter of King Juan Carlos, was charged with tax fraud and money laundering and summoned to appear in court on March 8. The charges are related to Cristina’s husband, former Olympic handball player Inaki Urdangarin, who has been charged with embezzling 6 million euros ($8 million) in public funds through his charitable foundation.

Both Urdangarin and Princess Cristina have denied wrongdoing, and the princess’s lawyer has said he will appeal the summons. The prospect of an ugly public trial would be a major blow to a royal family that has steadily lost popularity in recent years.

“Through a miraculous combination of political valor, public deference and children who know how to behave themselves, Spanish King Juan Carlos and his wife, Queen Sofia, have long enjoyed a level of prestige and respect of which most modern European monarchs can only dream,” TIME wrote in 2007. “Until now.”

That year, Catalan nationalists who set fire to photos of the monarchs during a visit to Girona were arrested for an “attack on the dignity of the monarchy,” but the act inspired photo burnings in other parts of the region. The protests may have revealed cracks in the public’s reverence for the royals, but in a series of blunders and scandals in the years since, the Spanish Bourbons figuratively (and once, literally) shot themselves in the foot.

The Verbal Smackdown

Only a month after the photo-burning protests, King Juan Carlos lost his preternatural cool at the Ibero-American Summit and told then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez,“Why don’t you shut up.”

The Spanish press speculated that the king may have been feeling some family stress. That month, his eldest daughter, Infanta Elena, separated from her husband in what the palace called a ”temporary cessation of their marriage.” Elena and her husband, Jaime de Marichalar, officially divorced two years later and he was stripped of his title as the Duke of Logo.

The Lawsuit

In May 2004, Prince Felipe, the heir apparent to the throne, married news anchor Letizia Ortiz, a gorgeous, glamorous commoner who was popular with the press. So too was Letizia’s sister, Telma who, years before Pippa Middleton, snagged some of the spotlight from her royal-by-marriage sister. Only Telma wasn’t happy with the attention, and in 2008, she filed a lawsuit requesting a restraining order against the media.

A judge in Toledo, Spain ruled that, like it or not, she was a public figure and not protected under a a privacy law. The media backlash was harsh, and to add insult to injury, Telma had to pay the defense’s legal expenses.

The Shot Heard ‘Round the Peninsula

The graft scandal that would eventually snag Princess Cristina was starting to gain steam in the spring of 2012.

News accounts that the king’s son-in-law was being investigated for involvement in a massive corruption scheme were surely causing a headache for the monarchy when the king’s oldest grandson Felipe, then 13, literally shot himself in the foot.

Felipe was finishing up target practice on his father’s estate when he accidentally fired a bullet into his right foot. Queen Sofia brushed off the accident, saying, ”These things happen with boys.”

Only Spanish law prohibits anyone under 14 from operating a firearm, and the country’s Civil Guard opened an investigation, calling the shooting a ”clamorous infraction.”

A judge would eventually dismiss the case, saying it was negligence, and Felipe recovered from his injury, but the accident shot a hole in the royal family’s image.

The Elephant in the Room

Less than a week after his grandson’s shooting accident, King Juan Carlos broke his hip while on a hunting expedition in Botswana.

The 74-year-old monarch was flown back to Spain on a private jet to have an emergency hip replacement. Rather than elicit sympathy from his loyal subjects, the king’s injury publicized that he had (legally) been hunting elephants.

“For the first time in Spanish history, wide swaths of the public are openly criticizing the King, and in some cases going even further,”

TIME wrote of the backlash. The newspaper El País said, “hunting elephants for pleasure is obscene and injures the sensibilities of millions,” while a website collected nearly 40,000 signatures calling for the king’s resignation as president of Spain’s branch of the World Wildlife Fund.

But the outrage wasn’t limited to animal lovers. The website of the company the king traveled with advertised that their 14-day hunting excursions cost nearly $60,000. The lavish nature of the trip caused an uproar in the midst of an economic crisis, a criticism captured by the conservative newspaper El Mundo: ”It transmits an image of indifference and frivolity that a head of state ought never to give.”

King Juan Carlos Should Abdicate, Say Two Thirds of Spaniards

By Harriet Alexander, The Telegraph, UK – January 5, 2013

http://tinyurl.com/lerpfug

The popularity of Spain’s King Juan Carlos has slumped to a record low, with almost two thirds of Spaniards thinking he should abdicate

King Juan Carlos of Spain has for the past 38 years been one of the world’s most popular monarchs.

But Spaniards have overwhelmingly lost confidence in him over the past 12 months, with 62 per cent now saying that he should step down.

By contrast, two years ago, in the first three months of 2012, almost 80 per cent of Spaniards had a positive opinion of the King. In the same survey this time last year, he remained popular, with under half thinking that the 76-year-old King should abdicate.

But Spanish newspaper El Mundo, which commissioned the survey, described 2013 as “the third consecutive annus horribilis” of the King, “in which the gap between Spaniards and the monarchy has widened.”

Spanish citizens have become increasingly frustrated by a long-running corruption investigation into the King’s daughter, Princess Cristina, and her husband Inaki Urdangarin – particularly at a time of economic crisis and widespread unemployment.

The corruption case of 2013 further damaged the King’s standing – which had already taken a battering the previous year when he was discovered to have embarked on a lavish hunting trip to Botswana at a time of grim austerity in Spain. He fell and broke his hip during the elephant-hunting safari, which caused the expense to come to light.

The King has appeared in public on crutches in recent months and in November surgeons replaced his left hip – his ninth operation since May 2010.

Ahead of his last operation, the palace firmly denied the King was considering abdicating.

Younger Spaniards, who were not alive during the Franco years, were overwhelmingly in favour of abdication, the poll showed. King Juan Carlos was widely respected for helping guide Spain to democracy in the 1970s after the death of Franco.

However King Juan Carlos’s son, Prince Felipe, 45, held on to a positive rating of 66 per cent – and most of those polled said the monarchy could recover its prestige if he took the throne.