The Financial Times
People in Focus: Simeon Saxe-Coburg
By Carola Hoyos
When Simeon Saxe-Coburg was born in 1937, church bells range across Bulgaria announcing the arrival of the country's future king. His proud parents, King Boris and Queen Joana, celebrated the birth of their heir by granting several thousand prisoners amnesty and adding a mark to every school child's exam. A few weeks later the young prince was baptised with water flown in from the river Jordan.
It was a grand arrival for the boy who would inherit the throne just six years later.
Decades have passed and Bulgaria has suffered through German occupation followed by 43 years of communism and most recently a painful transition into capitalism. Mr Saxe-Coburg spent most of that time comfortably in exile in Spain. Since the early 1990s he has sporadically returned to his homeland, regaining many of his families estates and keeping up with the political scene.
In April Mr Saxe-Coburg, who has stayed close to Bulgarian issues and unlike many of his other contemporaries has retained his country's language and religion (Orthodox Christianity), returned for good and Bulgarians again given him a celebratory welcome.
It took his fledgling political party, the National Movement for Simeon II, only three months to win the general election and on July 24 Bulgaria's one-time king became its newest prime minister.
He has promised to improve the living standards of Bulgaria's 8m citizens within 800 days. In a country where one in five people earn too little to feed themselves, it is an ambitious undertaking for a man whose only experience running a country came between the age of six and nine.
Mr Saxe-Coburg succeeded as tsar in 1943 when his father died shortly after a meeting with Adolf Hitler. A three-member council of regency was formed and the young King Simeon II reigned for three years. Following the Soviet coup of 1944, his regents, who included his uncle, were killed together with much of the country's intelligentsia. Two years later a referendum rigged by the Soviets forced the king and his mother to flee Bulgaria. They sailed via Istanbul to Alexandria, Egypt, where the young Mr Saxe-Coburg was enrolled in Victoria College, a British school.
In 1951 Spain granted the royal exiles asylum. They moved to Madrid, where Mr Saxe-Coburg attended the Lycee Francais and after dabbling in law and political science studies went on to Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania.
His adult life has been spent as a businessman in Spain and the US. For 13 years Mr Saxe-Coburg was chairman of the Spanish subsidiary of Thomson, the French defence and electronics group that has since been renamed Thales. Much of his energy, however, went into securing ties with business leaders and European aristocrats, who could later help reestablish him in Bulgaria.
In 1962 he further secured his already tight relationship with the Spanish royal family by marrying Spanish aristocrat, Dona Margarita Gomez-Acebo y Cejuela, who bore him five children, four sons and a daughter.
He travelled extensively for his causes, which were topped by the plight of Bulgaria's refugees, and become fluent in English, German, Italian and Spanish.
"Exile is the best schooling for a king, provided he can return!" he has been quoted as saying.
Bulgaria will have only to wait 800 days to determine whether Mr Saxe-Coburg's international education has prepared him adequately for his biggest test yet.
Send to Kindle
