Urdangarin’s tense meeting with Juan Carlos I (and the cushion that the Emeritus takes everywhere)

The family summit to be held this Friday in Geneva will be a mirage of the old Spanish royal family. And it will also mark the reunion of Iñaki Urdangarin not only with Cristina, with whom he is still married, but with her sister-in-law infanta elena and the kings Juan Carlos y Sofia.

At an awards ceremony this Tuesday in Madrid, the infanta elena confirmed that her father would be in Switzerland to attend his granddaughter’s coming-of-age celebration Irene Urdangarin, which also coincides with his graduation. The fourth daughter of the former Dukes of Palma, He has just finished his baccalaureate studies in eco ribbon, the prestigious International School of the Swiss city. The young woman seems to be starting the next Administration and Management course, within the hospitality career, at L’Ecole Hotêliere in Lausanne.

It is precisely five years since that day in June 2018, in which Infanta Cristina’s husband entered the Brieva prison in Ávila. It was also a month of June, 2014, when Juan Carlos I resigned his status as head of state. This June 2023, both meet for the first time, after years away for reasons that have something in common.

The two have been removed from palace life for unexemplary behavior and the two hold great resentment. Don Juan Carlos does not forgive his former son-in-law manifest infidelity towards his daughter. And Urdangarin, who has lived for months with Ainhoa ​​Armentia, He has always considered that the king could have avoided his judicial ordeal and is convinced that Zarzuela left him lying and used him as a scapegoat to cover up other excesses that were not his.

But Irene Urdangarín deserves this regrouping with her parents, grandparents, her cousins, her family. It is also a farewell to the life she has led up to now. The young woman leaves her mother’s house in Geneva and she must sign the divorce document of her parents, which will be made official shortly. The Infanta Cristina and Urdangarin were only waiting for her daughter to come of age to facilitate the procedures for the dissolution of their marriage, more complicated when there are minor children.

Don Juan Carlos will travel from Abu Dhabi to Switzerland, Accompanied as always by Vicente García-Mochales, Mochi, the lieutenant colonel of the Civil Guard and head of security for the emeritus, his trusted man and who literally supports him on his feet, given the king’s difficulties in walking and moving. Together with this man, a kind of assistant, support or guide, we saw the king in Westminster Abbey, to the coronation of Carlos III, also at the funeral of King Constantine in Athens, at the obsequies of Elizabeth II in London, or more recently at the royal wedding in Jordan.

There has been much speculation about the mysterious briefcase or wallet that Mochales always carries with him, in the other hand that does not hold the king. And in some media they have affirmed that it is a bulletproof vest, something that they deny Informalia in the environment of the former monarch. “There’s no point in carrying something like that locked in a briefcase, they’d wear it anyway. It’s something as simple as a cushion. Your Majesty needs it when you sit down, because with your damaged hip it hurts when you don’t support it on something like that. There’s no mystery.”