Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden

Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden (Victoria Ingrid Alice Désirée Bernadotte), born July 14, 1977, Duchess of Västergötland, is the heir apparent to the Swedish throne. She is the eldest child of King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia, and belongs to the House of Bernadotte. She is the only female heir-apparent in the world (though there are several females who are heirs-apparent of an heir-apparent) and is usually styled HRH The Crown Princess. She is currently 189th in the Line of Succession to the British Throne through her father who is a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom.

Her given names honour various relatives, including her great-great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria; her great-aunt Queen Ingrid of Denmark; her maternal grandmother, Alice Sommerlath, and her ancestor Désirée Clary, the queen of Charles XIV John and a former fiancée of Napoleon Bonaparte.

She was christened at Storkyrkan on 27 September 1977. Her godparents are King Harald V of Norway, Ralf Sommerlath, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and Princess Désirée, Baroness Silfverschiöld.

Education

Victoria attended a state elementary school and a private gymnasium (secondary school) in Stockholm, graduating in 1996. Afterward, she studied for a year at Université Catholique de l'Ouest at Angers in France, and for two years at Yale University in the United States. She has also spent considerable time studying and following the work of the Swedish government at the local, national and EU levels, as well as familiarizing herself with the Swedish economy.

In addition to her studies, Victoria has worked as a trainee at the United Nations in New York and at the Swedish Embassy in Washington, DC. She has also programme with the SIDA (Swedish International Development Agency), and interned at the Swedish Trade Council in Berlin and Paris. Victoria also studied forestry and agriculture.

Change in Status

She was created crown princess and heir apparent on January 1, 1980, by the 1979 Successionsordningen. This constitutional reform meant that the throne would be inherited by the eldest child without regard to sex; Sweden was the first country to adopt absolute primogeniture. This not only made Victoria the first heiress-apparent to the Swedish throne, but it also made her the first female in the line of succession at all. The constitutional change was apparently not supported by the King, who favored his son as heir-apparent (a view the King still has). Prior to this constitutional change, the heir to the throne was her younger brother, the then-Crown Prince Carl Philip; he is now second in line to the throne, and was given the title of Duke of Wermelandia. (The two siblings essentially swapped positions in the succession.) She also has a younger sister, Princess Madeleine, Duchess of Helsingia and Gestricia.

Royal Duties

The Crown Princess has made many official trips abroad as a representative of Sweden. Her first major, official visit on her own was to Japan in the autumn of 2001, where she promoted Swedish design. In 2002 she paid official visits to Kosovo, and in 2003 to Egypt and the United States. In the beginning of 2004, she paid an official visit to Saudi Arabia, as a part of a large official business delegation from Sweden. One of the most recent official trips she has done on her own was to Hungary in October 2004, where she opened an exhibition. Her recent official visit to Australia was to promote Swedish design. In June of 2005, HRH Crown Princess Victoria participated in the Swedish Business Seminar and Sweden Day celebrations in Ankara/Turkey during a historic visit which was organised by the Swedish Embassy in Ankara and Swedish Trade Council in Istanbul, she also visited the historic sights of Istanbul such as the Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace and Hagia Sophia.This was the first official Royal visit from Sweden to Turkey since 1934.

Marriage Speculation

Though the Crown Princess has long refused to discuss her private life, she frequently has been the object of press speculation regarding purported romances. Since 2002, she has been linked to Daniel Westling, a personal trainer and gym owner. When news about her relationship with Westling first broke, the Crown Princess said, "We're good friends, but I'm not going to say any more." However, in an interview on Sweden's TV4 in 2004, she did say that much of the criticism directed at Westling for being unsophisticated and uneducated was unfair. "I understand that there is speculation but sometimes there must be fairness too," she said. Later that year, the Swedish newspaper Expressen reported that the couple intended to announce their engagement in early 2005 and marry the following summer but no such announcements were made.

During her April 2005 visit to the World Exposition Aichi in Nagakute, the Crown Princess was interviewed by Mikio Yikuma, a reporter with the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun. Yikuma brought up the subject of royals marrying commoners, to which the princess responded, "I think the general idea of Swedes is that it's the modern way to marry someone that you love, not necessarily where she or he comes from." Though she did not mention Westling by name, the Crown Princess did admit, "There is someone in my life" but that marriage was not on her mind. The interview was conducted at the Swedish embassy in Tokyo and published in Yomiuri Shimbun on April 18, 2005.

Anorexia

In 1997, the Crown Princess brought public attention in Sweden to anorexia by admitting that she had an eating disorder and was receiving treatment. The condition was officially announced by a palace spokesperson after the Crown Princess's increasingly thin frame had become a subject of gossip in newspapers and magazines. A year after the condition was revealed, the recovering princess said in an interview, "I feel very good now, but everyone went through a really difficult period."

External links

The Royal Court of Sweden: Crown Princess Victoria