MADRID — Earlier this year, while visiting a telecom conference in Barcelona, Crown Prince Felipe worked the room as the heir apparent to the Spanish throne, smiling and glad-handing the crowd, until he ran into a Catalan businessman who refused to shake his hand, because of the Spanish monarchy’s opposition to a planned independence referendum in Catalonia this fall.
At first Prince Felipe ignored the snub, but then, brushing aside royal protocol, he turned around and tried to convince the defiant businessman to shake hands again, to no avail.
As he prepares to be crowned on Thursday as Felipe VI, replacing his father, King Juan Carlos, Spain’s new king will have many more opportunities to test his powers of conciliation and persuasion, and not just with Catalans who want their region to secede from Spain.
Even though Spain recently emerged from a lengthy recession, the crisis brought to the surface social and territorial tensions, and heightened demands for an overhaul of political parties and institutions tainted by corruption, including the monarchy, which opinion polls place at or near its lowest standing ever.
“We have to see whether Felipe can somehow act as a moderator and consensus builder in what has become a very tense political and social situation,” said Santos Juliá, a historian. “If he can succeed, it would also really help restore the prestige of the monarchy.”
One measure of the sensitivities surrounding the throne, and perhaps an early indication of how Prince Felipe, 46, intends to conduct himself in contrast to his high-living father, is that no other royals from around Europe or foreign leaders have been invited to the parliamentary ceremony that will crown him.
King Juan Carlos, 76, will not be in Parliament, either. Nor will Prince Felipe’s sister Princess Cristina, who is entangled in a corruption case centering on whether her husband, Iñaki Urdangarin, embezzled millions from sports events. Queen Sofia and Prince Felipe’s other sister, Princess Elena, however, will attend.
It is a decidedly low-key coronation for a man who by all accounts has assiduously prepared for the occasion his entire life, and yet who married a commoner, Letizia Ortiz, a divorced television presenter who will be the first Spanish queen from the middle class.
Though known for his seriousness and restraint, even remoteness, Felipe can nevertheless display a common-enough touch: Last month, the couple celebrated their 10-year wedding anniversary in the Matadero, a cultural center in Madrid, by sharing couscous on the wooden stools of its cafeteria after watching an Orson Welles movie.
Prince Felipe’s decision in 2004 to ignore the dismay of conservative royalists and marry Letizia is “our only real evidence so far that there is some power of leadership behind his reserved manner,” said Ana Romero, a journalist who has been reporting on the royal family.
Spain’s gossip media recently suggested that the couple had experienced strains in the marriage. But as other family members have been entangled in scandals, the prince has been extremely mindful of his own family’s privacy, including that of his two daughters, Leonor, who is 8 and now becomes heiress to the throne, and Sofia, 7.
Those are instincts that, friends and royals watchers say, may serve both him and the battered institution of the monarchy well, having already pushed his personal approval ratings far above those of his father.
Victoria Carvajal, a close friend of Prince Felipe’s since they were teenagers, said the new king felt “real affection” for his mother, and “some sort of admiration” for his father.
“King Juan Carlos is more charismatic, fun and intuitive — the kind of person who knows just when to give a hug — but I do think Felipe is more solid and intellectually more profound, somebody who really wants to be informed and get to the bottom of things,” said Ms. Carvajal, who went to the same secondary school in Madrid and spent summer vacations with the prince and his two sisters in Mallorca. “Felipe’s whole life has been shaped and driven by his awareness of the responsibilities lying ahead of him,” she said.
While his responsibilities are in many ways similar to those of his father, there are also significant differences, not least that they arise in a less dramatic circumstance than the one Juan Carlos encountered when he was crowned in 1975, two days after the death of Francisco Franco, Spain’s dictator.
Then, Spanish society was emerging from a lengthy period of isolation and trying to heal its civil war wounds; today it is emerging from a political and economic crisis that has ushered in the more diffuse second-phase challenges of an adolescent democracy.
“In 1975, there was one clear objective, which was to secure the transition to democracy, and everybody was ready to rally behind a young king who in any case could hardly prove worse than Franco,” said Ms. Romero, the journalist.
“Felipe, however, faces very diverse problems and expectations — including from the Catalans, the Republicans as well as the staunch monarchists — and that means he will almost certainly disappoint some people,” she added.
Juan Carlos was born in Rome during Spain’s civil war and the royal family’s exile and grew up uncertain whether Franco would actually restore the monarchy; Prince Felipe made his first official speech at 13 as part of his early grooming for the throne.
The prince received a broader education than his father, who received military training under Franco’s supervision. While Prince Felipe also attended Spain’s military academies, he completed his university studies, both in Spain and at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C., where his roommate was Pavlos, a Greek royal cousin.
Prince Felipe was a student “intent on self-improvement,” said John McNeill, a Georgetown professor who taught international relations to the Spanish prince, but also helped him improve his written English.
“He was using incredibly long sentences, filled with tons of subordinate clauses, and we worked together on writing in a more natural style of English,” Mr. McNeill recalled. “Certainly not all my students have been interested in also improving their writing.”
In addition to English, Prince Felipe has also learned Catalan and French. The 6-foot-5 former Olympic yachtsman has increasingly filled in for his ailing father at ceremonies, particularly since April 2012, when King Juan Carlos broke his hip during an elephant hunting trip that outraged crisis-suffering Spaniards.
Among the events was the soccer final of the King’s Cup between Athletic Bilbao and Barcelona, when fans of both teams booed and jeered the two main symbols of the Kingdom of Spain: its monarchy and its national anthem.
As King Felipe VI, he will still face an uphill struggle to restore the reputation of a monarchy that 62 percent of Spaniards would subject to a referendum, according to an opinion poll published by the newspaper El País, shortly after King Juan Carlos announced that he would abdicate.
“On paper, Felipe is clearly our best prepared king,” said Ms. Romero, the journalist. “But we’re still entering unchartered territory in terms of predicting what kind of king — and this at a fragile moment for the monarchy and Spain.”