King Felipe VI and Pedro Sánchez, on March 13, at the conference of presidents of La Palma. FERNANDO CALVO (AFP)
The Government contemplated -and finally ruled out- the possibility of launching a legal reform to change or eliminate the current inviolability of the King (which exempts him from criminal responsibility) without the need to modify the Constitution.
The matter was addressed in a series of meetings that took place throughout 2021 and in the first months of 2022 at the highest level between the negotiators appointed by Pedro Sánchez, the leadership of the PP and the head of the Casa del Rey.
The proposal was raised in his first contacts with the PP interlocutor, Manuel Pizarro, the then first vice president of the Executive, Carmen Calvo, who confirmed it to EL PAÍS: "I raised it, it was shuffled, it was put on the table and it was not He saw the opportunity at that time, neither by the President of the Government, nor by the PP, nor by the Royal House”.
In February 2021, President Sánchez entrusted his then political vice president, Carmen Calvo, with launching a new, more transparent, modern and up-to-date "framework for action" for the Monarchy in Spain, a couple of months after the head himself of the Executive advanced at Christmas 2020 that the Casa del Rey was going to undertake a series of steps to reduce its opacity.
On those dates, Sánchez called the then leader of the PP, Pablo Casado, to resume the frustrated negotiation to renew the General Council of the Judiciary - which later got stuck again -, took the opportunity to advance his plans for the Casa del Rey and asked him for a interlocutor.
The decision to summon the PP to these agreements came from La Moncloa, but with "the acquiescence" of Felipe VI, according to sources involved in the process.
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Casado offered the name of Manuel Pizarro, as confirmed last week by
El Mundo.
Pizarro had been one of the then popular leader's political mentors.
He was a lawyer and stockbroker, and in 2008 he came to
number two
of the candidacy for the presidency of Mariano Rajoy.
That experience in politics did not go well, but Pizarro (70 years old) maintained the relationship with Casado, was well seen by the Government, the PSOE and the Royal House, and has now also been included in the team of the new popular leader, Alberto Núñez Feijoo.
Once the interlocutors had been designated, in the following months Calvo, Pizarro and Jaime Alfonsín, head of the Casa del Rey, held several meetings and exchanged ideas and documents.
The connection worked to the point that, when Calvo left the first vice-presidency of the Government last summer, Pizarro publicly praised her as "a woman of state."
Calvo, now a deputy and president of the Equality Commission of Congress, is a jurist and doctor in Constitutional Law.
Carmen Calvo and Manuel Pizarro, in the Constitutional Court, in a file image. Kiko Huesca (EFE)
The first condition that Calvo raised during that first phase was precisely that the PP should be aware of and involved in this negotiation, even above the coalition partners of United We Can and discarded the republican or independentist formations, because it is the main party of the opposition and one of the signatories of the constitutional pact that squared in 1978 the new form of the State.
“It is the party that must be counted on for the reform to go ahead,” reasoned the first vice president at the time.
The following discussions were entertained to see how far the changes in transparency improvements could go and what legal forms they should be given.
It was at this point that it was concluded that some advances, such as the communication and publication of the budget of the Casa del Rey on its website, the figure of an internal auditor or the possibility that the Court of Auditors audit for the first time the expenses of the institution - the measures that have finally gone ahead - could be carried out by decree and without the obligation to approve a Crown Law.
And it was there when the discussion ran into the debate on the inviolability of the King and the theoretical reform of article 56.3 of the Constitution, which establishes that "the person of the King is inviolable and is not subject to responsibility" of any kind.
touch the constitution
The former vice president believes that one day another article of the Constitution will have to be changed, 57.1, which establishes the prevalence of men in succession to the Crown, but she understands that this is not urgent now because "by
de facto
" that article does not operates, as the two current heirs are women.
But Calvo thinks that he is not so sure that in order to change the condition of inviolability of the monarch it is necessary to touch the Constitution: he considers that it could be worth revising a law or a statute of the Royal House.
“I raised it, to the president and to the interlocutor of the PP.
She was shuffled, she was on the table and no one saw the opportunity at that time: neither the president, nor the Royal House, nor the PP negotiator, ”recalls the former vice president in conversation with EL PAÍS.
And she adds that the only European monarchy that has dispensed with that prerogative is the Swedish.
In recent literary conferences on
Monarchy or Republic
, which were held a few weeks ago in Seville, Carmen Calvo already anticipated, on this matter, that she believed that it would not be necessary to touch the Constitution to establish "what is inviolable and what is not" the King.
And she pointed out that it could be determined with some adjustment in the "organic law of appraisals" and an interpretation of the constitutional precept, so that "inviolability is what the ordinary legislator says."
The former vice president maintained in those days that Spain is increasingly demanding in measures for equality and against corruption, and considered that society does not seem to accept that "the head of state is above all laws", for which the The inviolability of the Monarch should in any case be limited to matters relating to the exercise of office, not "strictly personal".
It is a position held by many professors of Constitutional Law, although others maintain that inviolability cannot be compartmentalized.
This debate has taken place periodically between the parties represented in Congress, and it is always postponed because a majority, made up of PSOE, PP, Vox and Ciudadanos, concludes that this is not the time for those changes because there is not enough consensus, and that there is a risk that, following this debate,
A key piece for the file of the case against Juan Carlos I
The King Emeritus, Juan Carlos I.Europa Press
The inviolability of the King – which the Government of Pedro Sánchez, the PP and the Casa del Rey discussed eliminating in their talks for months to introduce changes in the institution, although it was finally ruled out – became one of the key pieces of the open investigations by the Prosecutor's Office of the Supreme Court against Juan Carlos I, which ended up shelved last March.
But it was not the only one.
Despite verifying conduct by the emeritus king that could have given rise to tax crimes, money laundering and bribery, the public ministry decided to shelve the investigation definitively for three reasons: because some of these actions had prescribed;
because they could not be punished as they were committed by the former head of state before his abdication in 2014, when he was shielded by inviolability;
In one of the decrees signed to put an end to the case, the Prosecutor's Office explained why the inviolability contained in the Constitution protected Juan Carlos I. "In relation to the funds received in 2008 by the Panamanian foundation Lucum (64.8 million euros) in an account of the Mirabaud bank in Geneva, whose real owner was Juan Carlos de Borbón, defrauded contributions to the Public Treasury have been identified in the Personal Income Tax for the years 2008 to 2012 that far exceed the amount of 120,000 euros that the Article 305 of the Criminal Code establishes the crime threshold”, affirmed the Public Ministry, which added: “[But] the possible criminal responsibility of the years 2008 to 2011 would be extinguished by the prescription of the crime.
Not so for the year 2012;
that, however,
nor would it be susceptible to criminal reproach.
Since, on that date and until June 19, 2014, Juan Carlos de Borbón was protected by the inviolability that article 56.3 of the Spanish Constitution recognizes the Head of State, as analyzed in detail in the file decree , in accordance with the interpretation of the scope of inviolability by the Prosecutor of the Supreme Court and the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court.”
The Prosecutor's decree also analyzes the possible commission of a money laundering crime, in relation to the financial and corporate operations carried out between 2008 and 2012 by order of the then King of Spain after receiving the aforementioned 64.8 million euros in the Lucum account.
"The acts likely to integrate any of the behaviors described in article 301 of the Penal Code would have ceased in 2012, a date covered by the inviolability that article 56.3 of the Constitution recognizes the Head of State," detailed the public ministry.
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