Only in a marriage that has basically been a partnership based on interests could there emerge a situation like the one that has occurred in recent hours between Spain's king emeritus and his wife, the queen mother. While Juan Carlos I has spent the last four days in parts unknown without his location having being made public, although even the Spanish government participated in the details of his flight, queen Sofia has, as if it were nothing, begun enjoying her regular holidays at the Marivent palace in Palma de Mallorca, and going shopping at El Corte Inglés and Zara Home.
Of her, we have the same images as in recent years, on the same dates; of him, there are no photos, reflecting the seriousness of the Spanish royal family's institutional crisis, in which we have no clue as to what is intended by the treasury inspectors looking into the apparent tax fraud, the prosecutors or the National Audience court. Of him, we don't know whether his current address is in the Dominican Republic, as has been published, or in Portugal, Morocco or some other country with a monarchy on the Arabian peninsula. By the way: how much does an exile forced by corruption scandals cost the public treasury in terms of work for state officials? Is anyone going to work that out?
All this happens with an astonishing air of normality in a Spain petrified by the action of the man who was head of state for almost 40 years and now, abandoned by those who protected him most in his excesses thinking that none of this would end up as it has done, he embarks on a rootless life in countries that guarantee him a certain judicial immunity. He is the new Shah of Iran although the original one was dethroned by Khomeini and the Islamic revolution, and in the case of the Spanish king emeritus, his fall comes about in a supposed act of service to save his son and preserve the crown, something that today seems difficult enough in the medium term.
Because, among other things, it will be difficult for a coalition government in which one party, the Socialists, wants to protect him in its own way, but trembles in its boots every time there is talk of a republic, that being a boat that nobody wants to miss - the young no less than the old. And Podemos? Pablo Iglesias is debating between, on the one hand, the comfort of his party's five Spanish cabinet posts and the hundreds of people it has placed at different levels of government, and on the other, the voices advising him that if he capitalized on the social malaise, a new horizon of electoral expectations could open before him.
In the end, as always, the dilemma is the same: play defensively or go on the attack. The first is apparently risk-free, but at the moment of truth, it never ends up being so. Catalan independence would do well, however, to avoid becoming more involved than necessary in the Spanish mess. Because, among other reasons, its own battle, difficult but no more so than that of those who want a Spanish republic, is the Catalan republic, the one thing that can assure the survival of the nation and not its dissolution within the Spanish state.