When the rumors of the end of the reign - a necessary end, according to many analysts - seemed to be beginning to die down, when the Monarch, apparently ignoring those voices, began to show increasing signs of recovery from the health problems that had been plaguing him in recent years, and even resumed an intense international activity, came the sudden and unexpected advertisement on Monday, June 2, 2014. A date with a place already reserved in our history.

The decision of abdication of King Juan Carlos, as was to be expected and has been confirmed, was not at all improvised. With the still limited time available for an in-depth analysis of what happened, it is possible to reconstruct an explanatory sequence of events, and to establish more or less firm causal relationships between them. In order to elaborate such a sequence, it seems necessary to go back to the years 2008-2009, when, in the midst of a social-political context increasingly affected by the crisis, the popularity of Don Juan Carlos, until then solid and stable, always at levels of acceptance of 7.5 out of 10, began to experience a dizzying fall, until it reached a mere 3 out of 10. The factors behind this unstoppable decline have been varied and overlapping: the general disaffection spread in the country towards a political class and institutions accused of being immobile and inoperative, accusations aggravated by the incessant corruption scandals; the discredit caused to the Crown by the scandals of the Urdangarín case, as well as by the imputation of the Infanta Cristina; the lack of reflexes shown by the Royal Household in its information policy, always unable to avoid moving at the wrong time, when not to do so in a somewhat erratic manner.

If Don Juan Carlos, heavily conditioned in the early years of his reign by the great taint of his illegitimacy of origin, was able to win the support of all the forces of the democratic civil service examination to Francoism -from the communists to the young reformists of the regime-, thanks to his irreproachable institutional performance, it could be affirmed, as Santos Juliá has pointed out in a recent article, that this same dynamic, although this time in the opposite direction, is at the basis of the strong disaffection that has become generalized around his figure. The Botswana incident could well be seen as an epitome of this.
Possibly, in his decision to abdicate in favor of the Prince we find the last great act of service to Spain and to Spanish democracy of King Juan Carlos, so that, in what can be considered as the last act of his reign, there has been nothing but a link with the brilliant career of the holder of the Crown until the final years of the last decade. It is precisely because of this trajectory, not because of what has happened in recent years, that the fundamental role played by Juan Carlos I in the recent history of Spain should be judged in justice.