Princess Leonor, the heir to the Spanish throne, has pledged her allegiance to the constitution in a ceremony that was boycotted by republican government ministers and Catalan and Basque nationalist MPs.
Leonor swore the oath in Spain’s congress as she turned 18 on Tuesday, and was accompanied by her parents, King Felipe and Queen Letizia, her sister, Sofía, and Spain’s acting prime minister, Pedro Sánchez. Her grandfather Juan Carlos, the self-exiled former king, was absent.
Leonor’s promise of allegiance to the Spanish constitution came 37 years after her father took the same oath on his 18th birthday on 30 January 1986. Felipe came to the throne in 2014 after his father abdicated amid plummeting popularity.
Juan Carlos, now 85, left Spain for Abu Dhabi in August 2020 after a series of damaging allegations about his business dealings further dented his already battered reputation and embarrassed King Felipe.
Juan Carlos and his wife, Sofía, were expected to be present at a private birthday party for Leonor at the Pardo Palace later on Tuesday.
In a short public speech following her oath, Leonor said she had “solemnly, publicly and formally promised to uphold our democratic principles and our constitutional values”. She added: “On this important day that I’ll always remember with great emotion, I ask you to put your trust in me, just as I have put all my trust in the future of our nation.”
Sánchez, who has been fiercely criticised for considering a possible amnesty for the Catalan separatists behind an illegal push for regional independence six years ago in return for their support in helping him form a new government, welcomed the occasion. He stressed the importance of social harmony and political diversity.
“With Princess Leonor’s oath, Spain today reaffirms the strength of its institutions and of its democracy, which is based on the constitutional principles of coexistence, equality, liberty and political pluralism,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Some of his ministers, however, did not agree. Ione Belarra, the Podemos leader and acting social rights minister, and her Podemos colleague Irene Montero, the acting equality minister, did not attend the ceremony. Also absent was Alberto Garzón, the United Left MP who is the acting consumer affairs minister.
“Princess Leonor’s constitutional oath today isn’t just another protocol event,” Belarra wrote on X. “The monarchy is looking to perpetuate itself over the coming decades but we are hoping that the institutions of state come under citizen sovereignty as soon as possible.”
Montero was blunter still, appearing to make a thinly veiled reference to the now-shelved corruption investigations that Juan Carlos faced.
“In a democracy, the citizens are the ones who should choose all the institutions that represent them,” she said on X. “The hereditary principle of the institution of the monarchy isn’t just outdated, it’s also incompatible with democracy. As, of course, is corruption.”
The ceremony – which drew crowds and for which huge banners displaying Leonor’s face were draped from lamp-posts in Madrid – was also boycotted by the two main Catalan pro-independence parties, the ERC and Junts, the Basque nationalist parties PNV and Bildu and the Galician National Bloc.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative People’s party (PP), congratulated Leonor on her birthday and said the PP offered its loyalty to the crown – “a symbol of unity, democracy and coexistence” – so that Spain could go on writing “the best years of our history”.
Santiago Abascal, the leader of the far-right Vox party, used the occasion to send a rather less coded message to Sánchez. “Today is a day of celebration on which we have the honour of accompanying the princess as she takes the constitutional oath,” he wrote on X.
“But even today we cannot allow ourselves not to speak the truth, nor to forget the betrayal of an acting prime minister who has delivered himself to the enemies of Spain. While the future queen of Spain swears her respect to the law, the acting prime minister is trampling on that same law. We will stand up to him.”
