“Actually, people abroad, from other countries, really like when we send our king as head of a deal mission. They are flattered”
Along the years that I have lived in The Netherlands, which as I have said before, are long and fulfilling ones, I have come to hear a wide range of reasons why we should keep, or at least appreciate, the monarchy that (more or less, or actually more less than more) runs the country. And every time I feel the explanation as bizarre as the one above. This one, particularly, seems to look at whoever is a guvernamental officer of another country, as some sort of indian, easily impressed by the knickers and the mirrors that the monarch is about to distribute.
The first time I heard a rational explanation was in a party organized by a fellow “inburgerar” (title given to persons busy with the mandatory course of dutch that I also took, when we both arrived to the country) His cousin told me that the Netherlands keep a monarchy because of the tourists. Faced with my face of total lack of understanding, he took that tone that people takes when explaining something obvious to some retarded kid, and explained it for me. Tourists come to Amsterdam to take a look at the royalty, he said. And that, of course, increases national revenues. I decided right then that it was worthless to argue that to provide a small family with millions of euros in properties, salaries and status could not be covered by the money that few actuall real people that travel to NL to “look at the royalty” (whatever that might mean) expends, let alone how much of that money will actually end up in the national treasury, place from which the costs of the royals actually come from.
The next preferred argument that I have heard along the years is about political power. The dutch in turn of arguing for the preservation of the country as it is will look at me like you look at a relic from a barbarian political past, and ask me “but do you really want to give so much power to a president”. Statement that normally is followed up by the explication, again in tone “let’s explain reality to this poor uneducated foreigner” that the Queen then or the King today, actually do not have that much power. So never mind changing the system giving the little representative power that the King has to an elected official, instead of a kid that happened to be born from a queen.
I suppose that if I look I would be able to find more and more bizarre reasons. But there are also true reasons. I think actually that the closer to reality explanation I ever heard was uttered by my beloved M, the girl that knows me since longer. Once visiting her at her house in Buenos Aires, she and her very good friend Martin were very happy with the impending marriage of Maxima and the King to be of The Netherlands. I did confronted them, asking how could they, argentinians that suffered the nightmare of the dictatorship unleashed by her family, could be happy about her becoming a true Queen. And then again, both of them looked at me as you look at somebody totally naive, and explained it to me. “It is a fairy tale, inti, just a pretty fairy tale”.
And so it is.