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As I said somewhere else, there is no reason why monarchy would collapse. There are other european monarchies: Belgium ; Denmark, Spain, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, Netherlands, and Sweden. None of them has a monarch as "beloved and omni-temporal" as Elisabeth, yet the monarchy survives. It survives because no one has any interest in killing it. You would get a lot of trouble, a constitution to change, and more importantly a president that could be a competitor to the prime minister. It is threatening for the parliamentary nature of the regime, as the personification of politics strengthens the power of presidents everywhere.
The idea of monarchy is based on a popularity contest is as anti-monarchist as you can get. A political regime where the head of state is chosen according to his popularity is called a Republic. In a monarchy, it's the continuity of the institution and the tradition that give the monarch legitimacy. If Charles abdicate, it means that he, or his family, or even worse the people, can actually choose who the monarch will be. Then, just end the monarchy and elect a president, because that is what you are asking for.
No one of these monarchies have the same challenges the British one has.
Apart from the absence of separatism and ethnic grudges and diversity and ex-empire going around, the United Kingdom have the ever threatening cultural americanization of the local culture
I would not be surprised to see American-style republicanism growing on the left as one of the next issues of culture war, especially knowing that Charles III have a lot of sympathies for conservatives environment (Blair forbid him to meet Hitchens when he published one of his first book, because he was scared of the Prince meeting a "reactionary")
They have huge problems too. Spain has Catalunya and Belgium has the partition risk of the country. Anyway, the monarchy won't go away if it is just useless, it has to become a part of the problem to be challenge. I do not know how it could create more separatism or more ethnic grudges.
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