Due to this there has been various activities going on during the year, such as him making official visits to all counties. On the 15th and the days surrounding it there’ll be various celebrations to mark the occassion, for instance the royal barge Vasaorden will be part of the public parade, the first time since the Crown Princess’ wedding in 2010 that it’s been used.
It has been quite a ride for him, in more ways than one. He became King at just 27 years of age. The reason being that his father, Prince Gustaf Adolf, died in a plane crash when the King was less than one year old. As a result the monarchy was trust into a crisis, not the first nor the last, given that the then King Gustaf V was quite old, as was his son the future King Gustaf VI Adolf who was the grandfather of the current King. Here’s all four of them at the current King’s baptismal.
To make matters worse there had been a long standing policy to remove Princes (and Princesses but they were not eligble to inherit the throne back then) from the Royal House and the line of succession if they married someone not from a current or former reigning house. Removals such as this and the now death of Gustaf Adolf left just one Prince, Bertil, in the generation between Carl Gustaf and his grandfather. He had also planned to marry a commoner and thereby remove himself as a royal, but was persuaded to refrain from this out of a sense of duty given the threat to the monarchy this posed. It was quite possible that Gustaf VI Adolf would pass away before Carl Gustaf even came of age, and Bertil was consider the fallback option to stand in as Regent if that happened. It was also acutely apparent that becoming a King at a young age was not optimal, the position required experience to navigate. Prince Bertil would thus also fill a very important role in guiding the future King during the first part of his reign, and so it came to be.
King Carl Gustaf has remarked in later years that despite all attempts to prepare him for what was to come he was thorougly unprepared. Yet on September 15th 1973 King Gustaf VI Adolf passed away at age 90, and the 27 year old was thrust upon the throne. Here he is swearing the King’s oath and holding his throne speech. Prince Bertil can be seen behind the justice minister in the first photo.
What greatly complicated matters was the political climate at the time of him becoming King in 1973, and both of the above depicted events can serve as an illustration to this. In the years prior the Social Democrats’ efforts to remove the monarchy and convert into a republic had pressured the right into a compromise: The monarchy remains but the actual powers of the King is removed. The heavily leftist winds that were blowing at the time fanned this course of events, and the Social Democrats secretly assumed that the coming King would embarass himself and the monarchy enough within a few years that they could then complete the move to a republic.
Initially in 1973 though the formal state of affairs remained, the King was, at least nominally, the executive power personified and presided over cabinet sessions and so forth. On January 1st 1975 the new constitution came into effect and those powers were largely removed, as were much of the pomp and circumstance surrounding the King. No more grand openings of parliament at the Royal Palace for instance, instead a toned down ceremony at the parliament building.
So the young King was under a lot of pressure, and his approach to handle this is clearly shown in the motto he had chosen. ”For Sweden - with the times.” Meaning he worked to modernize the monarchy so it would be more palatable in the current day. A slight hint of that can also be seen in the photos of him becoming King. If you look closely and compare with the official portrait and his predecessors in the baptismal photo you can see that he is only wearing two out of four royal order collars around his shoulders. This in an attempt to discreetly tone down the pomp, and he’s kept it up to this day. In fact that official portait is the only public photo I know of him wearing all four (though he did pose for an oil paiting intended to showcase the orders a few years back in which he also wears all four.)
In the end we can say that it worked. Despite clearly sub-optimal starting conditions he slowly managed to build up the monarchy again, marrying a foreign commoner in 1976 which proved popular, showcased his family’s everyday life over the years, and eventually managed to gain a pretty keen sense of when he should make a (rare) public stance on a topic. The abandonment of the old policy of banning marriage to non-royals means that the eligible number of people in the line of succession have now grown to eleven which reduces the chance of the House of Bernadotte dying out on its own, another threat in the past.
He’s also managed to shore up support for the monarchy enough, and its pomp and circumstance along with it (that’s been gradually reintroduced over the years), that we are even seeing the reintroduction of the awarding of royal orders to Swedish (non-royal) citizens. This had also been removed in 1975 so his latest batch of awards was in December of 1974. All the mechanisms are in place now and initial recipients are being selected, it’s possible that he’ll choose to to give out the first orders in connection with these jubilee celebrations. It would be a fitting illustration of how things have been turned around in these fifty years.
I hope that he’ll get to celebrate more jubilees going forward, and the next two presumptive monarchs are coming along nicely for the day when he’s gone.
