Spain's king remains popular despite doubts on monarchy (News Feature)

By Sinikka Tarvainen May 18, 2009, 10:37 GMT

Madrid - First, Basque and Catalan separatist football fans booed and whistled Spain's King Juan Carlos and the national anthem during a national cup final.

And then, a Catalan regionalist party launched an internet game with a map showing three Spanish regions as independent states.

To many outsiders, neither event might appear particularly newsworthy, but in Spain, they immediately sparked doubts about the solidity of the country's monarchy.

'The king asserts his authority against the whistles and the dirty game,' the conservative daily El Mundo headlined an editorial quoting a poll showing that nearly 60 per cent of Spaniards wanted the 71- year-old monarch to rule until his death.

Thousands of Basque and Catalan football fans protested the presence of the king and Queen Sofia at a match between Athletic Bilbao and Barcelona last week.

Police removed banners reading: 'We are nations of Europe. Good-bye Spain.'

The national television broadcaster TVE edited out part of the protests, following which its sports director was sacked for censorship.

Immediately afterwards, the large Catalan regionalist party CiU launched a quiz on Europe on its website as part of its campaign for the European elections.

The quiz includes a map showing three Spanish regions - Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque region - as independent states.

Analysts associated the football protests and the map with demonstrations that occurred in Catalonia in 2007, when separatists burned pictures of the royal couple.

Protests targeting people embodying the Spanish state are hardly surprising in regions with separatist movements, observers said.

The interest aroused by such incidents, however, also reflects the somewhat precarious position of the monarchy in a country where the king 'has to earn his throne every day,' as Juan Carlos himself has said.

The Bourbon king acceded to the throne in 1975 by the will of General Francisco Franco following his 1939-75 dictatorship.

Spain had previously experienced a three-year civil war and the 1931-36 Second Republic.

Juan Carlos won the respect of his subjects by thwarting a coup attempt against Spain's young democracy in 1981, but now his role in those events is also being questioned.

It is true that the king ordered the insurgent paramilitary police and military officers back to barracks, author Javier Cercas argues in a new book.

At the same time, however, Cercas sees the king as having contributed to the unrest by manoeuvring against then prime minister Adolfo Suarez, who had come under widespread criticism over the country's economic problems and killings by the Basque separatist group ETA.

Several events have raised questions about the future of the monarchy in the recent years.

They included a scandal over a sexual caricature on Crown Prince Felipe, criticism of the royals' alleged lack of financial transparency and of the queen's negative comments on homosexual marriages.

Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega dismissed the football protests as an 'isolated incident,' describing the monarchy as one of the country's most highly valued institutions.

In the poll by El Mundo, about 80 per cent of those interviewed had a 'good image' of Felipe, 41, whom they saw as being fit to reign.

The prince is seen as having increased his popularity after his marriage five years ago to former television news anchor Letizia Ortiz, who has helped to give him a less distant and more familiar image.

The couple now have two small children, and like to portray themselves as just another Spanish family, El Mundo pointed out.