LONDON — The announcement by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands that she is stepping down in favor of her eldest son, Prince Willem-Alexander, has generated a flurry of excitement in faraway Argentina, the homeland of his popular and charismatic wife, the former Máxima Zorreguieta.
“Argentina’s First Queen,” and “A Throne for Princess Máxima,” newspaper headlines enthused above profiles of the couple and tributes to the royal consort as a “queen of hearts” and a monarch of “style and glamor.”
Social media reflected the buzz, sparking a Twitter trend with the hashtag #MaximaReina — Maxima Queen.
“Mirror, mirror…who’s the most famous Argentine woman of them all?” asked Maria Xacur Puw in Buenos Aires, adding that Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the Argentine president, must be dying of jealousy.
“Fairy tales do exist…” posted Verónica Videla.
Not everyone was impressed. “Why should we take any pride in it?” asked one dissenter. “Being married to a prince? So what?”
There was one shadow over the celebrations, however, that was mentioned in reports from both Argentina and the Netherlands.
A notable absentee at the April 30 coronation at Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk, the New Church, will be Jorge Zorreguieta, the father of the 41-year-old princess.
Mr. Zorreguieta was a minister under the Argentine dictatorship of President Jorge Videla in which the ruling military junta killed thousands of dissidents during the so-called “dirty war” of the late-1970s and early 1980s.
A decade ago, the controversy over his past cast a shadow over the romance between the Dutch royal heir and the former New York-based banking executive.
Mr. Zorreguieta was obliged to promise that he would not attend their 2002 wedding before the Dutch Parliament would give its required approval to the match.
As Marlise Simons wrote from Amsterdam at the time, the prince had let it be known that he would rather abandon the throne and have a wedding in Buenos Aires than lose his bride.
Mr. Zorreguieta, a wealthy landowner who served for two years as agriculture minister under the junta, has insisted he had nothing to do with the disappearance of dissidents and was ignorant of the “dirty war.”
Skeptics would say that makes him one of the few Argentines to have lived through that era who was not aware of what was going on.
Although Princess Máxima has distanced herself from her father’s past, the 85-year-old Mr. Zorreguieta has made private visits to the Netherlands and the royal couple takes a regular New Year holiday in Argentina.
Before her 2002 wedding, she told the Dutch public that she abhorred the military regime and ”the disappearances, the tortures, the murders and all the other terrible events of that time.” Of her father, she said, “I regret that while doing his best for agriculture, he did so during a bad regime.”
Her family background has done little in the long term to dent her popularity with the Dutch.
The princess’s spontaneity on her wedding day endeared her to the Dutch public after all the controversy over her father, according to Argentina’s La Nación, which said that over the years she had become the Netherlands’ favorite royal.
When it comes to Mr. Zorreguieta, however, not everyone is so ready to forget the past. The “dirty war” remains a sensitive issue in Argentina almost 40 years on.
As the Netherlands prepares for the coronation, a federal judge in Argentina is investigating a complaint from the families of four victims of the “dirty war” who disappeared after they were fired from a farm institute that Mr. Zorregueita headed.
Commenting on the case, Argentina’s Pagina 12 said the former minister had always denied all knowledge of unlawful repression, murders, disappearances and the concentration camps that were employed by the dictatorship.
IHT Rendezvous: Argentina Celebrates Its First Queen ...
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