LONDON — As the man who shepherded his country from dictatorship to democracy following the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975, Spain’s King Juan Carlos accumulated a huge wealth of goodwill. Then, last year, with a few gunshots, he blew it. It was bad enough that the 75-year-old monarch was photographed on an elephant hunt in Botswana. But it also emerged he’d been vacationing with a woman who wasn’t his wife. The Spanish monarchy isn’t alone. Aristocrats from Olso to Brussels are experiencing a sharp downturn in the kind of adulation that once granted them licence to live it up across Europe.
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