2024-10-23 20:09:00
The frenetic Spanish news this hot autumn, with several important and relevant issues and many other irrelevant but interesting ones vying for the space of public debate, has somehow overshadowed news that perhaps deserves much more attention. It was signed by José María Irujo in The country and the headline read like this: “Gift from Saudi Arabia to Juan Carlos I for his coronation: 10 million dollars”. The subtitle has been added. “The money was deposited in a Swiss bank and was not declared to the Treasury, like other donations and subsequent millionaire payments.”
A few days earlier, the recordings with his lover Bárbara Rey were known, generously paid with public money with the authorization of Felipe González and José María Aznar. A few weeks earlier, information from José María Olmo in The confidential from which it was learned that the king emeritus set up a foundation with his daughters to inherit his assets with the lowest possible tax costs.
Blow after blow, news after news, the figure of the former head of state is crumbling at breakneck speed. His figure and also his name. When Juan Carlos took the throne after Franco’s death, some on the more disruptive left nicknamed him The Briefthinking it would be. Subsequently, political leaders from virtually the entire ideological spectrum and media of the most diverse varieties wove and spread around him an enormous cloak of silence that covered his first outrages; that is, they converted it for themselves into Taboo I of Spainand for public opinion in The Campechano. With what definitive name will it go down in the history books?
When the wind of public opinion is in their favor, heads of state are honored by giving their name to streets, avenues, parks, hospitals… In 1996, they gave the name of the current king to a newly founded public university in Madrid emeritus. Rey Juan Carlos University is today one of the main universities of our higher education system: it has campuses in Alcorcón, Aranjuez, Fuenlabrada, Madrid and Móstoles; It has nearly 50,000 students; It is the second in the Community of Madrid and the sixth in all of Spain. And he has a growing problem with his name, as the reputation of those who give it to him deteriorates.
In 2020, faced with the torrent of information about his economic shenanigans and the fortune hidden in the treasury of Juan Carlos I – a torrent that ended with a tax investigation and two regularizations on his part -, the students of the campus of the Madrid neighborhood of Vicálvaro gathered at the Vikalvarada Student Association promoted on the platform change.org a collection of signatures to change the name of the university. The initiative is still alive. On Tuesday, 62,142 signatures were collected.
In another similar initiative, again in change.orguser Santos Núñez del Campo even suggests an alternative name for what is now Rey Juan Carlos University. A name that some students and teachers already use: Universidad del Sur de Madrid. “Change the name,” he says in the justification for the proposal, “so that its graduates will not have to see in their title, for life, the derogatory name of a criminal monarch who betrayed his country.”
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