Luis Alfonso de Borbón and Martínez Bordiú turns 50 years old. She has been with Margarita Vargas Santaella, daughter of a Venezuelan banker with colossal economic power. The son of Carmen Martínez-Bordiú and Alfonso de Borbón y Dampierre, great-grandson of Francisco Franco and also great-grandson of King Alfonso XIII, has granted an interview to María Eugenia Yagüe for The world. He praises Francoism and the monarchy.
He has overcome terrible tragedies: the death of his brother Francisco when they were returning from skiing with their father; the accident that he witnessed and in which Mathilda Rossi, daughter of her mother’s second husband, lost her life. And the tragic death of his father on a ski slope in the United States.
In addition to his admiration for his great-grandfather, he claims as a descendant of the French Bourbons, from the Legitimist branch, the throne of the neighboring country and rejects the claims of the rival branch of the Orleans. Louis Alfonso de Bourbon is the Duke of Anjou and would be Louis XX, if there was a monarchy in France. He says of the monarchy that “it is a unifying institution” and maintains that “the King is the king of all Spaniards.” He considers that “a federal state is not good, nor would the European Union admit that the country would be atomized into small regions.”
On his mother’s side he is more Francoist than the dictator’s children. Luis Alfonso was one of those who carried the mortal remains of his great-grandfather on their shoulders when they left the Valley of the Fallen and holds the honorary presidency of the Francisco Franco Foundation, which the current government is going to outlaw. He maintains that the Francisco Franco Foundation is valid because it remembers the work of the “generalissimo”: “Hospitals, roads, Social Security, Christmas pay. There are achievements of all kinds that are still there and that still benefit us today,” Luis Alfonso emphasizes. “Franco is unquestionable that he left a Spain better than the one he found, there are the fruits. And our position worldwide.”
Regarding the separatist movements in the Basque Country or Catalonia, he says that “the big mistake that was made at the time was having given up powers such as education,” and explains that “if someone is beating you down from the moment you are born with certain ideas, that makes dent”, although it does not value his particular case and assumes that he is not a victim of indoctrination. Carmen Martínez Bordiú’s son says that his mother is happy in Portugal and that she visits him and his family from time to time. Letizia and Felipe “know our family,” he says. And he explains that “before it was complicated because we have lived outside and far from Spain,” he justifies.
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