Finally, the hermeticism of the Spanish crown is broken after former employees of the Spanish royal family revealed how decisions are made in the monarchy, ensuring that they have their own system to ensure they make the right decisions at the most difficult moments.
Rafael Spottorno, former head of the King’s Household, and Javier Ayuso, former press chief of La Zarzuela Palace, were in charge of revealing how the decision-making process is in the Spanish monarchy; according to the accounts of both of them, everything is solved with the ‘model of internal surveys of the palace‘.
In the book ‘Felipe, un rey en la adversidad‘, by José Antonio Zarzalejos, they explain that this system “is used for a ‘permanent check’ of the reputation of the members of the family in order to determine a general feeling and, depending on this, ‘maintain, correct, or change the way of projecting themselves on society, either directly or through the media’“.
It was thanks to this ‘system of internal palace surveys’ that the decision to abdicate from King Juan Carlos I was taken. Since this reflected that public opinion was turning towards the failure of the previous monarch and the approval of his son Felipe, the surveys were conducted weekly, from March 2012 to the first quarter of 2014, to gather the feelings of citizens, and, based on them, the decision was finally taken.
