Posted by JanEl
on 30/4/2008, 1:46:54, in reply to "Re: Succession laws revisited - for the umpteenth time"
209.174.180.154
--Previous Message--
: Well, in Sweden the Lord Chancellor's Office
: was asked to give their opinion. (And they
: would of course not give an opinion that was
: not sanctioned by the King.) They said that
: they preferred a system, where a daughter
: could inherite the throne if she had no
: brothers, but the Parliament decided
: otherwise.
And evidently this sentiment was expressed by King Carl XVI Gustaf even before his children were born (it has been said that from the very beginning, he never envisioned Princess Victoria as one day inheriting the throne. He hoped to eventually have a son, whom he expected to be his successor -- whether the law remained Salic, or whether the son would displace his daughter in line to the throne, if male-preferred primogeniture got enacted).
So the impression I get is that retroactive application of the new law (making succession completely gender-blind) was not the only reason for his objection to the 1980 constitutional amendment: it was simply too radical for his tastes (and who could blame him for thinking thus -- as he himself had been born the youngest of five children but only son of his parents?).
The way I see it: if some of these European royal houses that have opted for absolute primogeniture (e.g. Norway, Sweden, and Belgium) had already permitted female succession long ago (as in the British system), the issue of adopting such a radical change might not have come up at all. As it was, by the time people were ready to abolish the Salic law in those countries, it was already the 1980's or 1990's -- a time when complete equality of genders had become a fully established principle, in the minds of many.
