Menarue
Heir Presumptive
- Joined
- May 3, 2008
- Messages
- 2,155
- City
- Cascais
- Country
- Portugal
I guess I was talking about something I know nothing about. If the Belgian people are criticizing it must be for a reason they are the ones that count.
When did Mathilde's father died ?Pointe de Vue isn't a mag i'd go out and buy. It's a slow week and they have nothing much to report. However, I totally agree Laurent is a disaster.
It's funny - I've seen Philippe twice and both times he looked as if he was ashamed of being recognised. Completely ill at ease. First time was at the greenhouses at Laeken. He was with Matthilde with their daughter and Philippe pushing the pram with the baby. Matthilde knows how to act in public. She looked right at me and gave me a big smile. Of course, I smiled right back. Philippe just pushed the pram along looking at the ground. He really needs a few lessons in how to get the public to like him because he really gives off negative vibes. Like he really doesn't like us.
2nd time he was walking along with his kiddies in Knokke, the day after Matthilde's dad died. So obviously he took them to the beach to get them out of the way at a difficult time. The kids were dressed all alike in red dungarees. All laughing and cute together. Tumbling all over their dad in these go-carts along the digue. But again, he was all hunched up not wanting to be noticed.
I am really saddened by the fact that Pointe de Vue has joined a campaign of bashing the Belgian royal family. What has promoted Pointe de Vue to publsih this article? Could the article in question be paid by parties, who would like to get rid of monarchy?
I fail to understand the cristism of being boring and colourless levelled to Crown Princess Mathilde. What exactly do Belgians or any other party concerned want Crown Princess Mathilde to do? How should she become more colourful?
It is impossible to compare the engagement calendar of European Crown Princely couples. Different countries, different demands. Crown Princely couple travelled abroad with economic missions. Belgium is a relatively small country. How many Royal engagements can be possibly performed by the Royal Family? Should the members of the Royal family think some engagements up in order to avoid being viewed as lazy? For instance, Crown Princess Mary of Denmark was said to have engagements, which resembled just a photo shoot and did not promote anything worthwhile.... [snipped] However, I think "Point de Vue" does have a point. The king and queen, especially the queen, are virtually invisible. Philippe and Mathilde have less then 150 activities a year (compare that to any other crown prince and princess of Europe and you'll see the difference), every other member of the royal family, except Astrid, does pretty much nothing, yet they receive allowance. The Belgian monarchy is really out of touch these days. They need a shake up and serious image-changing work, otherwise the future for the Belgian monarchy doesn't look too bright. ... [snipped]
This less than 150 activities number goes back on a “research” by the tv magazine Royalty (as posted by Marengo elsewhere). And actually they have been positive on Philippe and Mathilde´s number of activities. What wasn’t mentioned by Marengo: These 146 activities are just those engagements, which are listed in the official agenda. According to Royalty there are several work meetings, audiences and visits which aren’t mentioned in their agenda (even Mathilde´s trip to China for a Young Global Leaders meeting wasn´t mentioned, just to give one example). Royalty also counted trade missions as one activity per day, but this sure doesn´t give the right impression of trade mission schedules as the agenda is really packed with activities from early morning till late evening. And after years of royalty watching I´m pretty sure the Dutch, Belgian, Danish and Norwegian CP couples have a more or less similar workload.The king and queen, especially the queen, are virtually invisible. Philippe and Mathilde have less then 150 activities a year (compare that to any other crown prince and princess of europe and you'll see the difference), every other member of the royal family, except Astrid, does pretty much nothing, yet they receive allowance.
""Actually the article is downright silly in many points. Their initial point is the rather modest party marking Albert´s throne jubilee. That´s the way it´s done in Belgium, the Sarkozy bling wouldn´t be appreciated and throwing a lavish party while the political crisis is going on – THAT would be out of touch. PdV then manages to get really silly by sentimentally mentioning the Lilian de Rethy glamour. Actually this kind of glamour was never accepted by the Belgians and Lilian de Rethy damaged the image of the BRF to the utmost back then, not to mention that she never had enough money to finance her lavish haute couture lifestyle and ended up selling family heritage like jewels etc., the main reason why the Belgian royal ladies are lacking in the jewellery department nowadays. As for their allegation Belgian royals have nothing substantial to say, well, every time they do so they score heavy criticism (e.g. Albert´s new years reception speech 2006), so it´s walking on eggs all the time. All in all the article just shows that the author isn´t very familiar with Belgian terms imo.
What urgently needs to be changed though is the whole setup of the court, alas, Albert really missed the opportunity to do so and still sticks to his court dinosaurs which isn´t clever imvho""
Source: BlogRoyale by norwegianne, comment by zoeymaree (2008, August 8).Another factor to consider is how and what is described as an event by the individual courts. They do have different ways of presenting this information and they have different styles of accounting.
The British and the Asturias couple are two examples of a liberal accounting system where everything is itemized and virtually everything they do is considered job associated. E.g. The Princess Royal departure for the Olympics is listed…..that’s just the departure.
Another example, this time the Asturias couple, in a morning of audiences at the palace, is not listed as a single event, but each delegation is listed separately and in going down the list it’s easy to count each one as separate from the way it is laid out on the page. It creates a subliminal message that they are doing many things when they are actually doing only one morning of work.
By contrast, CP Frederik last year did a day of audiences. It was listed on the official calendar as one event with no elaboration. Later, it came out that Frederik had received 53 persons and/or delegations. These were not counted separately as they would have been by some other royal courts.
When you compare the the accounting systems used by the Asturias couple and Danish court, for example, the results show a very diverging set of numbers.
The Danish system of listing events is modest to a fault and has done a disservice to the CP, in particular. Meetings or working lunch meetings, (e.g. the DoE,) with patronage people are not listed and council of state meetings don’t seem to get added in either.
....[snipped] ....
It’s better to first look at what each royal court defines as a royal event. Then to look at how it is presented. As you have listed above, there are other factors. The respective countries have different customs and traditions with their monarchies. Although they fundamentally do the same kind of work, how they go about it can vary.
The Spanish model is more audience oriented, few patronages. The Danish model is at the other end of the spectrum; more patronage oriented, fewer audiences.
Please don’t take this as a criticism. I’ve been looking at the same thing for some time and discovered that the numbers alone do not tell the whole story about how they work.
My only critique of some of the royal courts concerning this event accounting is that some of them seem to indulge in “grade inflation”
Al_bina;825360 [FONT=Courier New said:zoeymaree's opinion is to show an impossibility to compare workload's of European Crown Princely couples. It is wrong to say that one couple works more than the other because there is a huge difference in standards applied. I do not question accuracy of an royal engagement calendar of Crown Princely couples of Spain and Denmark. [/font]2008, August 8).
It would be wrong to further comparisons between the Spanish royals and Belgian ones. Needless to mention a significant difference in mentality, political situations, culture, history, etc. The Belgian Royal family deals with issues accumulated due to poorly resolved or unresolved issues of the past(I hope my assumptions are correct). A volatile situation in the government put King Albert into a very awkward situation. Johan Vande Lanotte stated that parties involved forced King Albert, who is supposed to remain impartial, to play a political role(2007-2008 Belgian government formation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). It is impossible for King Albert to please everyone in this political mess.I like Mathilde. I think she is the pretty version of Queen Sofia, classy, elegant, always impeccable from head to toe, a little boring ? Perhaps, but that's not a bad thing for a royal. If her hubby were as capable and charismatic as Juan Carlos, she would have been praised up to the sky. It seems her hubby's image had dragged her down a little, let her get all those unfair criticism.
I thought Astrid had been very low key the last few years. What did she do to deserve all those praises when the rest of the family were being criticized ?