Felipe VI of Spain (b. 1968)
Filed under the name Felipe · July 2, 2026
Royalty's not really my department — closest thing we had to a king in Braddock was whoever ran the union hall that particular decade — but Felipe VI trying to modernize an old institution like the Spanish monarchy is a job I can respect on principle, because I spent plenty of years myself trying to drag change into places that didn't want it, mostly the plant floor and the union offices. Institutions built on old traditions don't change easy, and whoever's stuck steering one through modernizing pressures while everybody around him wants either nothing to change or everything to change overnight is in a tougher spot than the title makes it look. I don't know the specifics of what he's actually done differently, being honest, but I know from thirty-some years as a grievance rep that trying to modernize something old and entrenched, without blowing the whole thing up in the process, takes more patience than people give it credit for. That's a harder job than it sounds like from the outside, crown or no crown.