It was, in the fullest sense of the word, a medieval scene. Devastating floods had just killed hundreds of people in Spain. Assailed by an angry mob of survivors throwing mud at the visiting dignitaries, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had fled the scene with his personal guard after being hit with a shovel.
Meanwhile, the King brushes away the protective umbrella brandied by a lackey, bends down — a ridiculously feudal touch, made necessary by the fact that he is almost a foot taller than everyone around him — to tell his entourage to back off, and plunges himself into a hostile crowd to hear their anger and comfort their sorrow. Later, the Prime Minister’s office would complain that the King should never have gone in the first place, much less drag his chief minister along.
That this tableau, which would have been intelligible to generations of our forebears, should have taken place in 2024 is entirely irrational. Spain is a constitutional democracy, in which King Felipe has no more power to direct the government’s rescue and recovery efforts than he has to govern by fiat and raise ship money. The Spanish monarchy has come under real criticism of late: back in June, 30,000 republicans marched in Madrid calling for its abolition. What’s more, Valencia, the former capital of the defeated republican government, is more hostile towards it than most of the country.
Perhaps there was also an element of public relations management from the Spanish royal household, which published a compilation of clips of the King speaking to and, in one instance, hugging two crying women, without accompanying commentary, as if it said everything that needed to be said. The complaints about royal security’s interference in rescue work was not mentioned.
But the instinct it revealed, though irrational in an age of constitutional government, is a deep-seated one. The instinct to run toward the personification of the state, to bitterly complain about the misdeeds of those who wield the actual power, has never vanished. In an age in which the actual mechanics of governance are as opaque as they have ever been, it tends to reassert itself in moments of crises.
Walter Bagehot, the vulgariser of the British constitution, saw it coming more than a century ago when he wrote that “[t]he best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is that it is an intelligible government.” Parliaments and party politics are “difficult to know and easy to mistake”; but when it comes to the basic principles of monarchy, “anybody can make them out, and no one can ever forget them.”
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SubscribeI had read about the king’s visit, but I knew none of the details – except the booing – like the hasty departure of the prime minister.
Bad policy is always the fault of the King’s evil ministers, not the King himself. Once you view constitutional monarchies this way then a lot of the “irrationality” makes sense.