The reign of Felipe VI has been forged through crises. It is not usual in parliamentary monarchies of established democracies for their holders to be constantly forced to circumvent what specialists define as “exceptional powers” or to have to assume prominence or even symbolic leadership in matters of essentially political nature. But the current King of Spain has had to occupy the throne at a time when he is passively and actively required to stretch the seams of the highest magistracy of the State. From the decisive intervention after the constitutional coup of October 1, 2017 by Catalan political secessionism, which put our common coexistence project in check, to more recent actions such as the very complicated visit of the Kings to Paiporta after the devastating Dana in the Valencian Community, embodying the presence of the State at a moment when so many citizens felt it was failing them and was not up to the task even for that intangible which is the management of collective pain.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the figure of the King has been magnified by the determination to be where the collective imagination assumes he should be, and by increasingly deploying the abstract capacities of the Crown, to their fullest expression. But this entails inevitable risks. Worrying wear and tear. And not small ones. Because, as Bismarck said about the exercise of power, “the politician thinks about the next election, the statesman about the next generation.” And a constitutional monarch neither can nor should be continuously exposed to the elements and the tightrope of scrutiny. The very speech of October 1 mentioned earlier was on the verge of exceeding the functions assigned by the Constitution. And the Crown also pays a price when it has to rely on boldness to fill gaps that belong to other public powers.
And this is how we have reached the latest major crisis in Spain, that of Ceuta, which again has placed the King in a situation that says a lot, on one hand, about the irresponsibility of so many politicians in assuming their well-defined competences and in doing institutional pedagogy, but also, on the other hand, about anomalies that have plagued our country since the Transition, and which end up turning against the one who surely deserves it least. Because Felipe VI is being forced into an obvious overacting in the thorny situation in the autonomous city to counteract criticism from all sides for something that few Spaniards understand but which is not a decision-making competence of the holder of the Crown: why he does not set foot in two cities as Spanish as Ceuta and Melilla.
The Prime Minister defined the avalanche of tens of thousands of people, with at least the acquiescence of Morocco, as “a violation of the territorial integrity of Spain”. Faced with such a serious statement, only a direct accusation by Sánchez of the culprit of such an attack on our borders would have been appropriate. Since the Executive opted for denial and in recent days from the president’s vacation in La Mareta to the practical absence of ministers in Ceuta have tried to reduce a crisis of such extraordinary gravity as the one we are experiencing to a mere humanitarian issue, Spanish citizens again perceive that same feeling of emptiness and abandonment by the State that dominated crises like that of October 1 – then with a Rajoy overwhelmed by reality and shrugging his shoulders -, that of the Dana, the train accident in Adamuz, the fires with central and regional governments throwing blame at each other, etc., etc. And too many eyes turn to the King, as he is the Head of that faltering State. But we Spaniards do ourselves a disservice when circumstances force a figure outside the political game to so frequently become a buffer to cushion government gaps.
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With the unusual audience at Marivent with the president of Ceuta, Juan Jesús Vivas, the King conveys to the people of Ceuta the support of the State with all the strength of the institution he embodies – Lévi-Strauss explained like no one else how symbols are essential for social cohesion; they are not mere decorations, they are constitutive of social reality -. But let’s not fool ourselves. The meeting – “The King is committed to the visit to Ceuta,” Vivas said yesterday in his subsequent statement – has gone far beyond protocol or a gesture of closeness. The crisis in the autonomous city has a very complex geopolitical background, with an uncomfortable southern neighbor who claims that Ceuta and Melilla are “two occupied plazas” in its territory, which indirectly compels the Monarch as the embodiment of the nation, its unity and permanence, as enshrined in the Magna Carta. And if no one misses that it is difficult for any Government – of whatever sign – to approve the opportunity of a trip by the Kings to the two cities under any circumstances, due to the immediate clash this would cause with the Alaouite Kingdom, it is no less true that we are sending a message of extreme weakness to Rabat when Don Felipe and Doña Letizia are not allowed to set foot in cities as Spanish as Burgos, Seville or Cáceres. Perhaps the time has come to weigh between two evils, although it would not be responsible for the King to stand firm neither in Ceuta nor in Melilla – as President Imbroda has demanded these days – without the agreement of the two main parties and without a public opinion prepared for the consequences.
In the almost 40 years of reign of Juan Carlos I, he only traveled to the autonomous cities once. He did so, along with Doña Sofía, in November 2007, with Zapatero in Moncloa, in a visit surrounded by absolute secrecy almost until the eve, although it materialized after long and intricate diplomatic maneuvers behind the scenes with Rabat in a controlled damage strategy. Although, following an almost scripted scenario, Mohamed VI raised an outcry, called the event a provocation and summoned the Moroccan ambassador in Madrid for consultations, the cordial relationship between the two Royal Houses and the close contacts between Zarzuela and the Rabat Palace until Don Juan Carlos’s abdication prevailed then. The relations cultivated later by Felipe VI and Mohamed VI have little to do with that. Nor has the Spanish monarch been allowed to play a more active role – always in the sphere of good offices, and under the political direction of the Executive in office, as it must be – in bilateral relations due to decisions difficult to understand adopted by Sánchez and his successive Foreign Ministers, as seen in previous crises, such as the Ghali case.
At the beginning of July 2020, the newspaper El Faro de Ceuta announced that Don Felipe and Doña Letizia were going to visit this city and Melilla as part of the tour they had undertaken through all the communities of Spain after the harsh months of state of alarm and strict confinement due to the pandemic. A few days later, that was deemed unfeasible, and neither Moncloa nor Zarzuela gave any explanation. It was another capitulation before a Morocco that has seen in recent years too many gestures of Spain’s renunciation of its principles, not to mention regarding the referendum in the Western Sahara. The Government’s silences inevitably affect the Head of State.