14 DAY TRIAL // Spanish monarch King Juan Carlos plans to abdicate after more than 40 years on the throne, the country's prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, announced on Monday.
According to Rajoy, the 76-year-old king will hand over the crown to his son, Prince Felipe, 45, thus becoming the first Spanish king to pass on the crown to his offspring since 1885.
“His majesty King Juan Carlos has just communicated to me his decision to abdicate,” Rajoy said in a statement broadcast nationally this morning. “I hope that shortly, the Spanish courts can proceed to name the current Prince of Asturias as King.”
The Guardian informs that the prime minister did not offer details on when exactly Juan Carlos would step down, but he did mention that the monarch took this decision for personal reasons, pointing at his repeated health problems, including five operations in the last two years.
However, there are voices that say it was actually a “political” decision. “He is abdicating given the new challenges in Spain because he thinks it's necessary to make way for the new generation,” one source said.
And as a matter of fact, there might be some truth to this speculation, as King Juan Carlos's reign was recently plagued by a series of scandals that have tarnished his reputation and made Spaniards lose confidence in him.
The corruption scandals involving his daughter Princess Cristina and her husband Iñaki Urdangarin, the lavish elephant-shooting trip to Botswana in the middle of Spain's financial crisis in 2012, and some rare statements he made in 2013 have all contributed to the steep decline of his popularity among the country's citizens.
Juan Carlos became King of Spain on November 22, 1975, two days after dictator Francisco Franco's death. He was credited with overseeing his country’s transition from the dictatorship of Franco to democracy, and was once one of the most popular monarchs in the world, but his popularity has deteriorated in recent years due to the aforementioned reasons.
Given that Spain does not have a precise law regulating abdication and royal succession, the country's ministers will have to hold a special meeting to establish the terms under which Juan Carlos's son would legally take over the crown as Felipe VI.
Prince Felipe and his wife, former television presenter Princess Letizia, have had an increasingly important role in ceremonial events in the past year and it seems that they have not been stained by the corruption scandal involving his sister and her husband.