MONACO - Prince Albert of Monaco will bring new energy and ideas to his wealthy statelet while continuing the sterling economic work of his late father Prince Rainier, but the 47-year-old bachelor needs to get himself a wife, say his subjects.
"He`ll be just like his father. I think he`s up to the job. We`re very proud of him," said Angelo Franco in a typically glowing reaction from locals questioned at random on the streets of this principality of 32,000 people.
But, advised car park attendant Franco, "it would be better for Monaco if he had an heir."
Albert, the second child and only son of Rainier, who died Wednesday, and the US film star Grace Kelly, had assumed some public functions on the international stage but his father never delegated powers inside the state.
So the tall and balding figure, a keen sportsman whose continuing bachelorhood is a subject of constant comment in the European celebrity press, is still untried in the ways of government.
"Rainier`s strength was to be both monarch and businessman," said France-Soir newspaper recently. "This is the equation Albert must face. Is he endowed as his father was with the same combination of charisma and entrepreneurial genius?"
Monegasques, as residents of this two-square-kilometre state wedged between the foothills of the Alps and the Mediterranean Sea are known, have no doubt that he is.
"He`ll modernise the principality. He has new ideas," said Alexandra Battaglia, an employee in Monaco`s tourist office.
"He has his American side," said a tobacco shop owner, who declined to give his name.
"He`ll take more time to reach decisions. He`ll be less Mediterranean. A Mediterranean decides quickly and then can quickly change his mind. But once Albert takes a decision he`ll stick to it," he said.
But while on the economic front Albert needs only to continue the polices of his father, who in his 55 years in power turned the rocky statelet from a riviera Ruritania into a thriving banking and business centre, his subjects are concerned that he needs to make changes in his private life.
Albert`s failure to wed and have children led to a change in 2002 to the statelet`s constitution, under which the dynasty can now continue to rule through the female line if he dies without an heir, instead of, as had previously been the case, the territory coming back under French control.
Unlike Albert`s sisters Caroline and Stephanie -- who between them have been married five times and have seven children -- Albert comes across as a conscientious, if slightly unexciting, figure.
His aides have however predicted that the prince, like his father, was waiting to succeed as ruler before making any wedding plans.
Prince Rainier was single when he took over in 1949 at the helm of the 700-year-old Grimaldi dynasty, and only married seven years later after meeting Grace Kelly at the nearby Cannes film festival.
"Now he`s going to take over he can calmly get married and I bet he will have two or three children," one palace insider said recently of Albert.
That would delight his subjects.
"It`d be better for the dynasty. And it would help recover the magic of Monaco," said the tobacco shop owner.
04/08/2005 07:46 GMT