The whole royal family was on the balcony of Buckingham Palace

With a military parade and an appearance of the royal family on the balcony, the British began to celebrate emotion on Monday the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe.

The celebrations, scheduled to last four days, began to read extracts from a speech by Prime Minister Winston Churchill on May 8, 1945. A military fanfare parade brought together more than a thousand members of the British armed forces. Eleven Ukrainian soldiers, guests in support, also paraded behind their flag, as well as fifty NATO troops.

Surrounded by the main members of the royal family, King Charles III, cared for for fifteen months for cancer, then praised the crowd from the balcony of Buckingham Palace, from where the family admired the overflight of military aircraft, completed by the acrobatic patrol of the Red Arrows leaving a tricolor trace in the sky.

Veterans

The king attended the parade with in particular Queen Camilla, Prince William and Princess Kate, as well as their three children, George, Charlotte and Louis.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer was also present, with around twenty veterans for many hundred years old, received at the palace in the afternoon for a “tea party”.

Thousands of people had gathered on the parade course, pavicated by British flags. Some had spent the night there, not to miss anything from this historic day.

“It is a moral imperative to be here, especially in this period of war,” said AFP Patrick Beacon, 76, who came with his wife Catherine de Coventry (center). “It is so moving to be there today, 80 years of peace and serenity, I do not know if we measure what it represents”.

“It is not so often that we remember the courage of an entire generation,” abounds Martin Rizcki, moved to hear the words of Churchill.

In a worried Europe, against the backdrop of war in Ukraine, “peace must never be considered acquired,” said King Charles III on April 9, before the Italian Parliament, evoking “the echoes of an era which we ardently hoped for that it was relegated to the past”.

The royal family participates in several commemorative events by Thursday, and after the controversial interview of Prince Harry Friday at the BBC, the palace said that it hoped that “nothing will prevent enthusiastically celebrating this precious victory and these courageous souls (…)”.

On May 8, 1945, it was from the same balcony of Buckingham Palace that King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, supervising Winston Churchill, had praised with their daughters Elizabeth and Margaret of tens of thousands of Londoners celebrating what Churchill had called the “Victory Day in Europe” (Victory in Europe Day, Ve Day).

In the evening, the two princesses aged 19 and 14 had been allowed to get out of the palace to join incognito on the jarrow crowd, for a night that Elizabeth became queen described 40 years later as “one of the most memorable nights of my life”.

The British were also invited to participate in hundreds of parties, picnics, exhibitions and commemorations throughout the country.

On Tuesday, Queen Camilla will admire in the London tower an installation of some 30,000 ceramic poppies, symbols of the victims of the wars, and many buildings of which the Westminster Palace will be illuminated in the evening.

The celebrations will end Thursday with a national minute of silence at 11:00 GMT (1:00 p.m. Swiss), and an action service thanks to the Westminster Abbey in the presence of the Royal Family, before a concert planned on the Grande Place de Horse Guards Parade in London. The pubs were allowed to close two hours later as part of these celebrations.

Even if the young generations are more indifferent to it, they are all the more important since “this is probably the last occasion where there will still be survivors” of that time, estimates the historian and specialist in the Monarchy Robert Hazell, of the University College London. (Mbr with AFP)