After months and months of waiting, King Juan Carlos yesterday fulfilled his desire to set foot on Spanish territory again. It is not the visit that he wanted, neither in form nor in substance, but with his trip a dynamic of continuous and frustrated attempts to return has been broken. The King's father has returned, albeit for a visit, on a trip as desired as lightning that began yesterday shortly after 7 in the afternoon in Vigo and will end on Monday mid-afternoon, when, after meeting with his son and other relatives in the Zarzuela, start your way back to Abu Dhabi.
When he left on August 3, 2020, Spain was his country of residence and he visited the emirate. Now, almost two years later, the tables have turned: his "permanent and stable" residence is in Abu Dhabi, as highlighted in the statement made public by Zarzuela last Wednesday giving official confirmation of his return, and Spain is a passing destination. This twist in the script of his life is precisely the safe-conduct so that the return operation has been facilitated from Zarzuela.
Juan Carlos I left to return in a few weeks or months, but the continuous postponements of that return ended up turning Abu Dhabi from a temporary destination to a practically permanent one. The reason must be sought in the evidence that after the successive appearances of economic and fiscal irregularities in the finances of King Juan Carlos and the weight that these issues have had on his image, on public opinion and the damage caused to the Crown, a definitive return was becoming more and more difficult.
While the investigations were open, both in the Swiss and in the Spanish Prosecutor's Office, in search of an alleged hidden fortune, it was impossible to prepare the return operation. From Zarzuela, King Juan Carlos was informed that he should wait for these legal cases to be closed, and he did so.
Meanwhile, fiscal irregularities surfaced that were corrected with regularizations with the Treasury, and King Juan Carlos paid more than five million euros for donations received, some in kind. The fact that he had not declared that a distant cousin had paid for private planes and that a Mexican businessman had provided him with opaque cards did nothing more than show that the meritorious institutional performance of the head of state for almost 40 years hid some decisions in his private life, at the very least, of dubious morality.
The image of the king of the transition, architect of the process of democratization of Spain, was overshadowed by much of public opinion. The sentence of exile appeared as the penance that King Juan Carlos had to pay for the mistakes made. The Government of Pedro Sánchez has not only not remained on the sidelines; In these months he has asked, with greater or lesser emphasis, that King Juan Carlos give public explanations about events that have not had a criminal conviction, but have a moral one.
La Zarzuela, following its policy of promoting the image of exemplary character and transparency imposed by Felipe VI, has put up repeated firewalls with King Juan Carlos making decisions that, in addition to institutional distancing, have practically caused the family to break up. Balancing the interests of King Juan Carlos, Zarzuela and Moncloa has been revealed as an impossible mission. Juan Carlos de Borbón is already in Spain, but not in the Spain of which he was King.
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