Felipe VI, Montserratine festival

That symbols are important is an idea that should be clear, especially to the King of Spain, who is someone who, let's put it this way, thrives on being a symbol. The King of Spain is an institution, and his function, his reason for being, is fundamentally symbolic. Specifically and emphatically, the King—the monarchy—is the symbol of the unity of Spain, and of its indivisibility. In a parliamentary monarchy, which is the form of the Spanish state, the King—or the Queen, if the now Princess Leonor comes to govern—literally personifies the nation, which in turn is the state, and whose main attributes are that it is indissoluble and indivisible. All of this is stated in the preliminary title, Article 1, of the Spanish Constitution of 1978.

It turns out that Felipe VI failed in this symbolic role, and he did so when he could have made the least mistake, at the moment of maximum tension between Catalonia and Spain, on October 3, 2017. We already assume that the King of Spain will not accept the secession of a part of Spanish territory, but what he absolutely cannot do—because he is also the head of state and the head of the armed forces—is accept the repression of police forces against citizens who express a perfectly legitimate and democratic political opinion. Felipe VI did exactly this on October 3, which makes him a failed king. He even had a close model to look up to, which was the behavior of the Queen of England during the Scottish independence referendum—and even during Brexit—but he preferred the Hispanic tradition of clubbing and limpingThis has earned him the unanimous applause of Spanish nationalism (a court writer says that on October 3rd a king made him curdled, whatever this is) but it made it unable to continue occupying the space of centrality and consensus that the Spanish monarchy (accepted even by the Catalan and Basque nationalist parties) had carved out for itself since the Transition around the figure of Juan Carlos I. The result, as it was seen again this Monday, is that Felipe VI and Letizia will no longer be able to return to Catalonia without having to hear protests.

The other area of erosion (the worst, in fact) facing Felipe VI's reign is precisely related to his father, and that is corruption. This is a terrible service to Spain's international image. Now that accusations of corruption are also suffocating the Socialists, passing off the agenda of supposed normality as a visit by the failed king to the Montserrat monastery on the eve of Saint John's Day (which couldn't have been more symbolic), and then culminating in a renewed crackdown on protests, is a downright bad way to spend the festive season.