The Zapatero family's jewelry is today the main focus of tension in Spanish politics. The former president of the government has just been charged in a separate piece of the one that Judge of the National Court José Luis Calama was already investigating. The immediate consequence, beyond being summoned to testify again, is that as soon as legal action has been initiated regarding his jewelry, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero can no longer regularize them. Article 305.4 of the Penal Code establishes that he could have done so before the investigating judge formally communicated the opening of proceedings.

The monarchy, with the support of the PSOE and the opposition of the triple right, wanted to turn this week the fortieth anniversary of the coup d'état of 23-F into a way of vindicating the discredited figure of the king emeritus. According to the official story, the actions of Juan Carlos I put a stop to the tejerazo and saved the then young Spanish democracy. But the attempt has remained just that, an attempt. Not in vain, Felipe VI's father has long since fallen into disgrace on his own merits. He can no longer be saved by the sweetened epic of that distant episode. The emeritus has lost the popular support that for years surrounded him and made him an institutional pillar of the State; now the monarchy cannot find a way to overcome the crisis of legitimacy in which it is immersed. For years Juan Carlos I has been squandering the credit he had earned during the Transition, to the point that the accumulation of scandals led him to have to abdicate and finally go into exile in a shameful escape to Abu Dhabi, where he still resides and from where, thanks to the passivity of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor and the Tax Agency, he is manoeuvring to escape his tax crimes. If last December he paid the Treasury up to 678,393 euros to avoid a tax investigation into the opaque cards, this Thursday it has been learned that he has made a new payment of 4.3 million to avoid what would be a fraud in the Treasury of 120,000 euros. It is clear the favored treatment that he continues to receive. And that makes any restoration impossible, not even moral.