The Prince of Liechtenstein, one of Europe's most powerful monarchs, will learn on Sunday whether his powers are to be cut.
Some excerpts from MarNoe's
Telegraph link...
From his ancient schloss, dramatically perched on a clifftop high above his tiny capital city Vaduz, the Crown Prince of Liechtenstein rules his subjects as one of Europe's last truly powerful monarchs.On Sunday he will find out if that is to end, when the result of a hard-fought referendum is announced on whether to cut his power. The prince himself has warned that he might withdraw from his official duties if the vote goes against him - a threat, made in parliament, which many understood to mean that he and his family would pack up and leave for exile, with their wealth of around £3 billion.
Since the campaign took off, Prince Alois has rarely been seen in Vaduz, which lies directly below his castle with its fabulous views across the Rhine to snow-covered Alpine peaks.Liechtensteiners often used to bump into him in its streets, with his wife Princess Sophie and their four children, shopping or drinking coffee in one of the little cafes sandwiched between big shiny banks and souvenir shops full of cuckoo clocks, where he is on first name terms with many of them. The familiarity does not go the other way - "Your Serene Highness" is what they call him.
Liechtenstein is the second-richest nation on the planet after Monaco, with an average per capita income of £85,000 and hundreds of millionaires. So nobody expects the prince's 36,000 subjects to grab pitchforks and rampage out of their large neat chalets, with swimming pools and Mercedes limousines parked in the driveways. Liechtensteiners like their prince, who is 43, because he is personally charming and they credit his family for ensuring their enviable prosperity and stability. Most of their grandfathers lived in poverty, before they hit on the idea of starting banks for foreigners.
The royal family are the descendants of Austrian noblemen, related to the Habsburgs, and today used to mingling with billionaires and statesmen at home and abroad. Their little fiefdom was a backwater for centuries, abolishing serfdom in 1808, only declaring a constitutional monarchy in 1921, and not bringing in votes for women until 1984. Before that, in the 17th century, Liechtenstein was notorious throughout Europe as the "witch country", and one of the prince's predecessors was known for dancing to loud music to drown out the screams of accused women being tortured in the castle dungeons below.
Prince Alois attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and was briefly in the Coldstream Guards in Hong Kong before working in the City of London to learn the ropes of the family business, banking. He married Sophie Elisabeth Marie Gabrielle, a German duchess and former student of history and English literature in 1994, and their children - three sons and a daughter - are aged from 11 to 16. He is immensely wealthy. His family owns LGT, the biggest of the principality's 16 banks and a favoured place for the international wealthy to keep their money out of the clutches of their nations' tax authorities.
None of this damaged has the prince's prestige with the principality's royalists. Cars bear stickers saying "For God, Prince and Fatherland", and royalists have posted loyal video messages in a Facebook campaign. "The prince is like a father to us, it is a spiritual thing," said Markus Burgler, 51, a civil servant who has started an internet support campaign. He was confident that the referendum proposal would be comfortably defeated. "You British have your Queen, so you must understand why we support our prince," he said. He wholeheartedly backs the prince's unbending position and deferentially describes the Crown Prince's threats to step down from his duties as a matter of royal "opinion". He said: "We are prosperous under him, he is a guardian who ensures stability. "England has Big Ben, France has the Eiffel Tower, we have a prince. He is what makes us Liechtenstein."
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