Since the speeches made by the Spanish monarchy are usually innocuous - on the few occasions when that rule is broken, complete upheavals occur, with October 3rd, 2017 being the most notable example - it is almost always necessary to pay attention to photographs, greetings, glances, gestures and absences. Felipe VI's trip to Buenos Aires to attend the swearing-in of the new president of Argentina, Javier Milei, gave rise to several situations that make it possible to evaluate the performance of the Spanish head of state.
Among other reasons, this is because just a few weeks ago Felipe VI presided over Pedro Sánchez's taking of the oath as prime minister of the Spanish government at the Zarzuela royal palace and he did so while wearing a tight grimace. Something that did not go unnoticed, since the expression coincided with the anger of the Spanish right about the agreements reached by the secretary general of the Socialists (PSOE) with the Catalan pro-independence parties, which allowed him to displace the winner of the July 23rd election, the president of the People's Party (PP), Alberto Núñez Feijóo. Barely ten minutes of ceremony, some charmless photographs and little else was the legacy of Pedro Sánchez's swearing-in ceremony. The right-wing press underscored the royal facial expression and gave a reason for it: the amnesty law.
That is why the huge smile, complicit and not at all modest, stood out more than a little at the inauguration ceremonies of the right-wing populist Milei and his party La Libertad Avanza ("Freedom Advances"), who achieved a surprising victory over the officialist candidate by promising absurd things in all areas and defining himself as anarcho-capitalist. In fact, the swearing-in of Milei ended up becoming something of a far-right summit, with Vox leader Santiago Abascal as a personal guest and other profiles of the more radical right such as Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo. They weren't the only recognizable extreme-rightists, there was also Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, among others. Because of Milei's profile or because of the tense relations between the Spanish executive power and the royal house, the monarch was not accompanied by the foreign minister, as would be normal, or by another cabinet minister, but by a simple undersecretary.
Felipe VI presided over the swearing-in of Pedro Sánchez wearing a tight grimace, which is why his huge smile, complicit and not at all modest, stood out more than a little at the ceremony for Javier Milei
That all this coincides with the well-known turmoil within the Spanish royal family, conveniently avoided by the fragile and vulnerable paper press, is nothing more than another sign of the instability and restlessness in which the Bourbon monarchy is entrenched, first with the abdication of Juan Carlos I from the throne due to his corruption cases, which would end in his exile in the United Arab Emirates, and then with the crown's belligerent position on the Catalan issue and the repression of the independence movement. This erroneous attitude means that the amnesty law now also has the Spanish monarchy among its losers, since, in the end, what is recognized with this law is that there were excesses, irregularities and that the anti-independence slogan of the time A por ellos - "Let's go get 'em" - might be useful as an extremist chant, but not as a way of practicing politics.