How can it be that whenever the Spanish royal palace seeks to communicate any news about the corrupt affairs of Juan Carlos I and the monarchy, it always coincides with a moment when public opinion is concerned with other things? The departure of the former king to his golden exile in the United Arab Emirates took place in the first hours of August 2020, taking advantage of a weekend in an attempt to cushion the impact of his flight from Spain just as numerous cases of corruption were emerging. Just as current king Felipe VI decided to announce that he was renouncing his father's inheritance and withdrawing his allowance on March 16th, 2020 - coincidentally, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez had decreed, just 48 hours earlier, on March 14th, Spain's first statewide state of alarm to combat the coronavirus. And, since good things come in threes, this Wednesday, in the midst of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with a conflict of still unknown global dimensions underway, the public prosecutors of the Spanish Supreme Court have decided to end their investigation of any possible criminal offence that may exist on the part of Juan Carlos I over alleged commissions for the high-speed train contract in Mecca. He did receive the money but was protected by his status of inviolability, and once he no longer had that status, then either the matters weren't so clear or, under the statute of limitations, it was too late.
Thus the judicial matters have been left atado y bien atado - "all very well secured", as Franco put it in his famous phrase on the resilience of his regime - which, I suppose, is what it was all about. All that remains is for someone to complete the gesture by sending him a homeward ticket to Madrid, and at that point, as if it were a question of kiss and make up, the Socialist government will have completed the operation begun by Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba as leader of the opposition with the then-prime minister Mariano Rajoy: to bring about a rapid and unavoidable handover of the head of state role from Juan Carlos to his son, before the Spanish crown exploded; to deactivate the bomb that existed in the form of Corinna zu Sayn Wittgenstein, better known as Corinna Larsen, the then-king's lover and receiver of commissions; and, finally, for Spanish justice to end its probes into the numerous scandals that haunted him in Spain, the UK and Switzerland. The Corinna folder remains, but everything else that had been opened up has now been closed.
On the way, due to the impact of, on the one hand, the territorial conflict over the Catalan independence demand, which has only been postponed and only after relentless repression, and on the other, the scandal of the former head of state who hastily left Spanish territory to settle in the United Arab Emirates, Spain's international image has fallen to significant levels of degradation. An international report released yesterday which includes the latest update of the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) index assesses that Spain has slipped back between four and twelve positions in the world rankings. The recently published annual ranking of The Economist's index also placed Spain in the category of "flawed democracy" for the first time. Reports are appearing and they all point in the same direction: Spain has lost its democratic quality, and its justice and repression are part of the reasons for this.
All the judicial cases are closed, but the link between the Spanish monarchy and corruption has not disappeared at all. A personal problem has been solved and, if it is desired, that return ticket from the United Arab Emirates to Madrid can be issued. But the institutional problem persists as the key issue has not been denied: there was corruption, but Juan Carlos could not be prosecuted due to his capacity as head of state, or the time period for doing so has expired, or it has not been possible to prove it. Too many loose ends to tie up for a monarch who will never be able to cleanse himself of the fact that corruption was part of how he carried out his tasks as king for almost a period of almost four decades that ended up in the scrapheap where all broken toys get thrown.