Corona: not just the problems we knew about

Corona just means crown. We use the word for things that have, or seem to have, a crown. There’s a corona around the sun. There’s a corona around the particularly nasty virus we talk about so much these days. And, of course, there’s a corona on every crowned head, by very definition.

So spare a thought for poor Spain. Like England, it’s struggling with both the health and the financial impact of the virus. Its strict lockdown to protect public health worked a lot better than the weaker measures in Britain, but the damage to the economy has been painful. Though, oddly, England has damaged its economy even more seriously, while controlling the pandemic less well. But then, England has Cummings and Johnson.

Today, however, cases in Spain are increasing once more at a depressing rate, and lockdown measures are having to be reintroduced. Just as they are in England. Although in England they seem to be targeting the Midlands and the North first of all, as though the Conservatives want to punish traditional Labour areas for having the audacity to vote for them instead.

Spain has an additional element of suffering. It’s also having to cope with Corona problems of the other, more ancient variety. The ones associated with the Crown. Especially since its previous occupant, Juan Carlos I, erstwhile King and now King emeritus, decided to do a bunk, fleeing abroad to some destination that has yet to be made public.

Juan Carlos I: ex-King who did a flit, and who knows to where?

His flight was precipitated by the ongoing investigation of his financial affairs. In particular, the judicial authorities find that his bank accounts in Switzerland raise a number of questions they’d like answered (yes, the understatement is deliberate).

This is sad, because Juan Carlos was the designated successor to the dictator Franco but, instead of maintaining the dictatorship, he oversaw an orderly transition to democracy. A referendum adopted the new constitution, still in force today, less than three years after the dictator’s death.

What’s more, not three years after that, when a coup against the new regime was launched by disaffected members of the paramilitary police and the army, Juan Carlos spoke out powerfully against it, rallying the nation to the cause of legitimate government. That ensured the coup’s failure.

Guardia Civil Colonel Antonio Tejero invading Parliament

Now, I’m a bit of a cynic and I share the misgivings of many over the length of time it took the King to come out with that statement. The initial attack against the Parliament took place just before 6:30 in the evening and the King’s broadcast went out at 1:14 in the morning. He recorded it around an hour earlier, but even that was six hours after the coup was launched.

There are those who say he knew in advance that it was going to happen, and only came out firmly in opposition once it became clear not enough of the army supported it. I don’t know how true or false that is. It is interesting, however, that there are those doubts, and that even as long ago as 1981 there were therefore some suspicions clouding the admiration felt towards the King by the Spanish people.

Which may have been a harbinger of what has happened now.

Even so, there are over 600 streets and squares called after Juan Carlos I across Spain. I am, indeed, in one of them now, as I write this piece from the flat near Madrid my one-year-old granddaughter inhabits and kindly shares with her parents (and, right now, us).

Today, a number of councils are facing motions from the Left suggesting it may be time to change the names of those streets and squares.

The government, too, led by Pedro Sánchez, a Socialist but on the Right of his party, is having to fight off moves from his coalition partner, from parties on whose parliamentary support he relies, and even from Socialist colleagues, to review the legal position of the Crown in Spanish politics. It is an offence, for instance, to insult the King, though that could be changed simply by new legislation. More problematic, the King can’t be held accountable for his acts either, and to change that would require a constitutional amendment.

Not the moment, Sánchez argues.

Ah, yes. He has a lot on his plate. Spain is closing down discos and bars again as the scourge of the virus builds again. The country has a shattered economy to rebuild. And now it has the distraction of a monarchy with a former King who’s beginning to look as toxic as the virus.

It amazes me that in today’s world we still have regimes led by men entitled to deference by right of birth. That strikes me as something to fix, so I’d like to see all three questions addressed at once. And perhaps in Britain as well as Spain.

But I can see how it makes the uphill struggle that Spain already faces even steeper and longer than it already was.

So spare my adopted nation a little sympathy…

Postscript: when the military knows how to respond to a coup

On the night of the coup, 23 February 1981 (so the event is referred to as 23F), the only city that was taken over by the military was the one where we live now. Let me quickly say that the two things aren’t causally connected. It’s just that the military region of Valencia was commanded by the general who supported the coup most actively.

Things went reasonably smoothly for him, until he sent tanks out to the airport at Manises, to get the air force unit there to join in. He got a dusty reply from the colonel in charge, according to the story a minister of the time later told:

“I have a Mirage on the runway with its engines running and armed with air to ground missiles. If the tanks heading for the base don’t turn around and pull back I’ll order it to take off and attack them. And I have another Mirage fighter ready on the runway just in case.”

The tanks retreated.

The King has flown...

The King has flown the coop! Literally.

Well, literally as far as flying is concerned. I understand he took a plane. He didn’t really live in a coop, but in a significantly more desirable residence, the Zarzuela palace on the outskirts of Madrid.

He wasn’t a real King any more. He abdicated in 2014 and became ‘emeritus King’. Some nasty scandals, involving an elephant shoot, a mistress, and a lot of unexplained millions, made it advisable for him to stand down.

The elephant hunt was in Botswana in 2012, when Spain was struggling with soaring unemployment. Junkets at 40,000 euros a head weren’t viewed favourably. Especially when the King’s expenses were being covered by a Saudi businessman.

Besides, the King wasn’t accompanied by his Queen, Sofia, but by Corinna Larsen. Let’s just call her a ‘close friend’.

Emeritus King and close friend

The business of the millions emerged later, and many of them came from Saudi too. For what hasn’t ever been made clear, but he built up 100 million US dollars in a Geneva bank account. He transferred 65 million euros to Corinna. So you can see how close a friend she was.

There were also delightful moment, including the transfer of banknotes to Switzerland in a briefcase. Straight out of the kind of clichéd international thriller series that you might only watch on a wet Sunday, if you don’t feel up to anything more demanding.

I ought to clarify that when I say he wasn’t a ‘real King’, I was using the word ‘real’ in the English sense. In Spanish, ‘real’ doesn’t really mean real, it means royal, which he really was once, but isn’t really any more. Following a royal cockup.

I hope that’s clear.

It amuses me that if you live long enough, you get to see practically everything. I never expected to witness the restoration of a monarchy. To me, restoring monarchies was something Europe gave up on a couple of centuries ago. But, in 1975, Spain put the royal family back on the throne. That meant crowning the King we’re talking about, Juan Carlos I.

Now that I live in Spain, I keep being surprised by how many things are ‘real’. You know, you don’t have a yacht club, you have a royal yacht club. You don’t have a Music Academy, you have a Royal Academy of Music. It’s like England, rather than most Latin nations, which are Republics.

Still, if the restoration of the Spanish monarchy struck me as an anachronism, at least the events that accompanied it were pretty impressive. The dictator Franco had made Juan Carlos heir to his power. That was the Franco who had seized power in a military uprising forty years earlier and consolidated it through bloody civil war and brutal repression.

Juan Carlos used Franco’s legal framework to take Franco’s system apart. Within three years, the Spanish people had voted by referendum to move to a parliamentary monarchy as democratic as any in Europe. The subsequent elections included parties that had been banned and hunted for decades, including the Communists.

The King had been under no obligation to take this road. Most historians agree that, though the popular pressure for democratisation might have been hard to resist, he did far more to ease the transition than one might have expected. He built himself an enviable reputation, so that even among Republicans, many would say, “I’m not a royalist, I’m a Juan-Carlist”.

There aren’t so many Juan-Carlists these days. No one has put it better than the ex-King himself: “anyone under the age of 40 will only remember me as the one with Corinna, with the elephant and with the briefcase”.

How the mighty are fallen.

Still, it’s exciting to witness not just the restoration of a monarchy, but now the flight into exile of a monarch. One more throwback to a distant past.

Juan Carlos is keen to stress that his isn’t a flight from justice. It’s true that, sadly, all those dodgy financial transactions have led to police investigations. Even Corinna, now ex-friend just as he’s the ex-King, may be facing up to four years in gaol for money laundering. Juan Carlos says he will make himself available to any enquiries into his affairs. His departure from Spain was just to cause no further embarrassment to his homeland, and to allow his son, now King Philip VI, to play his role more easily.

It’s not clear where Juan Carlos will end up. It seems that for now he’s gone to the Dominican Republic. A lovely irony for Republicans: a King abandons his monarchy to take refuge in a Republic. You couldn’t’ make it up.

Who knows where he’ll head next. He obviously has friends in Saudi, but it’s hard to imagine him going there. But, hey, who knows.

In any case, and this may not come as a surprise, it doesn’t seem that Queen Sofia will be joining him.

In England, for decades after the Stuarts were kicked off the throne, their fans, when drinking the King’s health, would pass their wine over a glass of water, to indicate they were drinking to the “King over the water”.

Perhaps some in Spain may do the same for Juan Carlos. Or, if he does go to Saudi, they could pass their glass over a dish of sand. Unless they feel a piece of elephant hide is more appropriate.

Interesting times…

In praise of shutting up. And a departing King

I always had ambivalent feelings about the late Ugo Chavez, de facto President for life of Venezuela. He sometimes said and did things I felt were right, above all to help the poor, but then he did so much that was wrong, and even did the right things in such a wrong way – hectoring, bullying, authoritarian – that I simply couldn’t warm to him. He seemed thoroughly obnoxious.

So it was with delight that I learned that the King of Spain had told him, in a conference of Spanish-speaking nations, to put a sock in it. “¿Por qué no te callas?” he asked, “Why don’t you shut up?”

¿Por qué no te callas?

So well received were the King’s words that for a while they became the most popular ring tone on Spanish phones.

More recent anecdotes have been less flattering for poor Juan Carlos. It was a shame, for instance, that he chose to go elephant hunting in Africa. That he did so at a time when most of his subjects were struggling with the effects of the worst crisis to the hit the nation in a century, added a measure of insensitivity to the offence, and left his reputation in tatters.

A bare 41% of the population now approve his rule.

In passing, I should point out that technically this is irrelevant: a system in which you can change your head of state when you’ve had enough of him is called a republic. The whole point about a monarchy – or a state presided over by Ugo Chavez – is that you can’t.

Even so, Juan-Carlos has decided to abdicate, and Spanish parliamentarians are rushing through legislation to make it possible. Which must seem ironic to quite a few of their compatriots: many have lost their jobs over the last five years, without the benefit of special legislation.

So the King has decided it’s time to shut up himself, even if in his case what he’s shutting up is his shop. One has to congratulate him. I suppose we’ve all had situations in which we’d have done better to shut up, and wished afterwards that we had. His, I feel, is an example to follow. I can think of quite a few people who I’d be happy to see follow it, but I won’t name any of them here, since I’m sure you have your own list.

He’s going to be replaced by his son, Felipe. Curiously, he too knows a little about being told to shut up. He married a former TV anchor, Letizia Ortiz. The Guardian explained that at a press conference where the couple announced their engagement, “as Ortiz was explaining her plans to leave her job in the media, Felipe interrupted her. She snapped at him, ‘Let me finish!’”

I hope Felipe took it better than Chavez. Because in both cases, as in so many others, being told to shut up was excellent advice.

The passing of Hugo Chávez

So Hugo Chávez is gone, despite the months of claims from the Venezuelan authorities that he was recovering. It calls to mind Spike Milligan’s epitaph, ‘I told you I was ill’, except that in Chávez’s case it was the opposite: he kept arguing that he wasn’t that bad. 

Chávez: he spoke for the people
Without much of a pause to let anyone else get a word in

It’s going to be fascinating to see how he divides people in death, just as he did in life.The thing about Chávez is that he was a remarkable champion of the poor and the underdog, and more than happy to take on the power of the elites to defend the underprivileged.

On the other hand, the way he set about the task wrecked the Venezuelan economy, only kept afloat by Venezuela’s oil resources. When he came to power, oil accounted for 80% of the country’s exports; today it accounts for 96%. Such has been Chávez’s impact on the manufacturing and agricultural sectors.

But there were other even less attractive aspects to his role in power. Like a great many rulers who know they speak for the people, he began to see ordinary democratic rules as nothing but an impediment to democracy: after all, if democracy is rule by the people, and he speaks for the people, then any regulation that limits his capacity to rule is by definition anti-democratic. So Chávez started shutting down opposition media outlets and ensuring that his was the only voice heard, especially at election time.

This is a standard behaviour of populists who seize power. Augustus overthrew the power of the vested elites of Rome that had oppressed the people; as a result a Republic was replaced by an Empire both the elite and the people lost what rights they had. The Third Estate in France rose against the monarchy in the name of the people, and rapidly fell under the spell of men who felt that rights were best protected by a police state. Lenin took the Bolsheviks to power in Russia to speak for workers and peasants and rapidly did away with any mechanism of popular representation.

One of the other characteristics of these champions of popular aspirations is that they like to make sure they stay in power once they’ve got there, and Chávez was no exception. He managed to obtain authority in a referendum, at the second time of asking, to remove term limits from the presidency so that, had he survived, he could have been re-elected as often as he wanted. That would have enabled him to go on speaking for the people for a long time to come.

By ‘speaking for the people’, by the way, I really mean ‘speaking’. He was capable of going on TV and talking for eight hours at a stretch. And I have to confess that a man who likes the sound of his voice that much, and what’s more is prepared to take over the media and amend the constitution so that he can ensure everyone else gets to hear it too, fails to win my unqualified admiration.

I don’t much like monarchy, because I’m even less attracted to the idea of people being born to high office for life than I am to people getting themselves elected to office for life. But I have to say that despite myself, I was delighted when the King of Spain rounded on Chávez at the Iberian-American summit on in 2007, and asked him ‘why don’t you just shut up?’

Well, Chávez has stopped talking now. The next big fear is whose voice will fill the vacuum when his fell silent. Because that’s the other problem with these great authoritarian champions of the people: they open the door to successors who are even worse. It didn’t take long to get from Augustus to Nero, nor to get from the French National Assembly to the reign of terror and then the military dictator Napoleon, and Lenin was immediately followed by Stalin.

Time to hope for the best for the people of Venezuela.