The Royal House in trouble. Cartoon of 06/07/2025 in CTXT. In the image, Felipe's pig.
"Felipe VI freezes his salary and draws on savings for the Royal Household due to the lack of budgets". This was the headline, with a few variations, which last week gave rise to many jokes.
It goes without saying that these headlines, evidently for show, are a stale practice that the media, many of them, have continued to practice in order to write lots of hagiographies of the Bourbons.
This inheritance has its origins in the times of fear, when the slightest criticism of the monarchy or its surroundings was considered treason, but these courtly journalists, who continue to maintain the same buck-passing style of the Movement's Press Chain, now do so delightedly and "voluntarily", according to the sacrosanct editorial line.
The mission is the same as in the past: to glorify all members of the Royal Household, as they did before with the murderous dictator who placed Juan Carlos after swearing allegiance and loyalty to the principles of the National Movement.
But let's leave the anecdotes and get down to the nitty-gritty. Felipito, they say, has had to "pull out" his savings. The use of the verb is not innocent, nothing in a headline of this kind is. Resorting to this particular verb is a covert way of slipping in the idea that the royal family is like any other family, just as humble as yours or your neighbour's.
We know a thing or two about campaigns to try to convince us of the Bourbons' folksiness. You know, they may break protocol to greet an anonymous vassal or stroll among the plebs eating an ice cream like any other common earthling.
Well, those excesses are over. Now they have to tighten their captain general's sashes because the money they had saved to buy a whim on AliExpress is now needed to buy potatoes at least once a month to pay the electricity bill.
It's not easy to maintain a house on just under 10 million euros. If we add to this the fact that Felipe has a miserable salary of 277,000 euros a year for carrying the weight of the country on his shoulders 24 hours a day, and Letizia barely manages to scrape together 152,539 euros a year, combining various odd jobs as a fake freelancer, things get very complicated.
Within the catalogue resulting from the breakdown of the term"poverty", the incorporation of a new term, majestic poverty, is already being considered.
