The hectic 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 somewhat overshadowed news that perhaps deserves much greater attention. It was signed by José María Irujo in The Country and the headline read like this: “Saudi Arabia’s gift to Juan Carlos I for his coronation: 10 million dollars.” The subtitle added. “The money was deposited in a Swiss bank and was not declared to the Treasury, like other donations and subsequent million-dollar payments.”
A few days before, the recordings with his lover Bárbara Rey, generously paid with public money with the authorization of Felipe González and José María Aznar, were known. A few weeks before, information from José María Olmo in The Confidential by which it was known that the king emeritus has set up a foundation with his daughters to leave his assets to them as an inheritance with the lowest possible tax costs.
Blow by blow, news by news, the figure of the former head of state is crumbling at breakneck speed. His figure and also his name. When Juan Carlos came to the throne after Franco’s death, some from the most disruptive left nicknamed him The Briefthinking it would be. Afterwards, political leaders from practically the entire ideological spectrum and media of the most varied variety 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 they have the wind of public opinion in their favor, heads of state are honored by giving their name to streets, avenues, parks, hospitals… In 1996, they gave a newly founded public university in Madrid the name of the current king emeritus . The Rey Juan Carlos University is today one of the main universities in our higher education system: it has campuses in Alcorcón, Aranjuez, Fuenlabrada, Madrid and Móstoles; It has almost 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 the one who gives 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 in a tax investigation and two regularizations on his part -, students from the campus in 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. This Tuesday, 62,142 signatures had been collected.
In another similar initiative, also in change.orgthe user Santos Núñez del Campo even proposes an alternative name for what is now the Rey Juan Carlos University. A name that some students and teachers already use: Universidad del Sur de Madrid. “Change the name,” he says in his reasoning for the proposal, “so that his graduates do not have to see in their title, throughout their lives, the opprobrious name of a felon monarch who betrayed his country.”
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