THE SPANISH CROWN IS NOW A SYMBOLIC INSTITUTION (AND SO IT WILL CONTINUE WITH REFORMS)

Abstract

The Crown in the Spain of the 21st century is emerging as an eminently symbolic constitutional institution to which hardly any properly arbitral or moderating powers can be assigned. Its opportunity and future maintenance among the society over which the unipersonal magistracy exercises the head of State depends on an absolute rationalization, which purifies any manifestation by the Crown of acts or choices of public importance, as well as the elimination of the loopholes that prevent the full submission to the law of the institution itself and/or the private behavior of its circumstantial occupants. Civic education on the merely symbolic nature of the Crown distances the entire citizenry from future collective frustrations derived from the substitution of the current form of the Head of state for another one.