The new Grand Duke of Luxembourg, Guillaume, swore on Friday, a few moments after his father’s abdication.
“I swear to observe the constitution and laws,” the forties said since the deputies of the Luxembourg Chamber, surrounded by royal couples and leaders of European institutions.
Luxembourg celebrates the advent of a new sovereign: the Grand Duke Guillaume was sworn on Friday morning at the head of this little European monarchy, just after the abdication of his father, Henri.
Guillaume happens to Henri, 70, who abdicated a few moments before, visibly transferred, after 25 years of reign.
The new great couple, Guillaume and his wife Stéphanie, must comply with the population in a place in the historical district of the capital of this state that has just over 670,000 inhabitants, including almost half of foreigners (47%).
Gala dinner with Emmanuel Macron
Before a gala dinner on Friday night, in which French president Emmanuel Macron and his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier will participate in particular.
The festivities are planned throughout the country until Sunday to mark the “Trounwriessel” (“change to the throne” in Luxembourg).
Guillaume, 43, is the seventh sovereign of the Nassau-Weilbourg dynasty, which has reigned on Luxembourg since 1890 and sharing common origins with the Dutch monarchy.
Even if it embodies a new generation at the head of the State, it should not alter the practice of power, in a parliamentary democracy considered stable where the monarch assumes above all representation functions in addition to enacting the laws.
In Luxembourg, “the Grand Duke embodies the independence and stability of the State,” said Prime Minister Luc Frieden, interviewed by AFP.
As for Guillaume, “he is thirty years older than his father, he was educated at the Luxembourg school unlike the latter who had private lessons, so it will be a new style,” he predicts … before the nuances: “A more open style perhaps, but in the continuity of the father and grandfather.”
Guillaume is the oldest of the five children of the couple formed by Henri de Nassau and Maria Teresa Mestre, born in Havana and whose father, a Cuban businessman, fled his country with his family in 1959.
There is no “dazzling modernity”
“With a Cuban mother we can imagine that she will have a more Latin approach, maybe a little warmer,” said Belgian historian Patrick Weber. “But I really don’t expect a dazzling wind of modernity,” adds this expert from Benelux’s monarchies.
Guillaume has married since 2012 with the Countess Stéphanie of Lannoy, as a result of a family of Belgian French -speaking nobility and is known to be passionate about art and literature, dominate French, Luxembourg, German and English.
The couple has two children, Charles, 5 years old and François, 2 years old.
The former Grand Duc Henri had launched the transition process in 2024, saying that he was anxious, since he approaches his 70th anniversary, to “raise” and find “some freedom.” He approached the throne in October 2000 after his father Jean.
The heir Guillaume shows an international course: after his education in the Great Duchy, he studied in Switzerland and then at the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst, in Great Britain.
He then spent a double license on letters and political sciences at the University of Angers in France.
Source: BFM TV
