Dutch royal renounces throne over marriage row
Dutch Prince Johan Friso, who is second in line to the throne, has announced that he will give up his right of succession because the government has refused to give its backing to his proposed marriage.
The Prince – Queen Beatrix’s second son – insisted he would still marry Mabel Wisse Smit, after she conceded that she had misled the government over the extent of her involvement with a high-profile criminal, Klaas Bruinsma, who was killed in a gangland shooting in 1991.
The couple, who are both 35, had claimed that Ms. Wisse Smit had known the mobster for just a few months while she was a student. But amid rumours that she and Bruinsma were lovers, she recently admitted that she had known him for well over a year.
Dutch law requires royals who wish to succeed to the throne to gain permission from parliament before marrying. But Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende – a devout Calvinist – told journalists that the government had lost confidence in the couple when they provided information that was ‘not complete and not correct’.
Both Queen Beatrix’s own marriage to Claus von Amsberg caused riots in the Netherlands – previously occupied by the Nazis – because of his involvement in the Hitler Youth. And the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Willem Alexander, married the daughter of a former member of Argentina’s military junta.
Ms. Wisse Smit is a human rights activist who has worked for the United Nations and George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
