Armengol, forced to rectify to demand Catalan in healthcare after a political storm

The president of the Balearic Government, Francina Armengol, has been forced to rectify the stabilization plan for temporary workers so that Catalan is required of health personnel.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
01 February 2023 Wednesday 05:37
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Armengol, forced to rectify to demand Catalan in healthcare after a political storm

The president of the Balearic Government, Francina Armengol, has been forced to rectify the stabilization plan for temporary workers so that Catalan is required of health personnel. The bases of the call did not include this requirement, which has caused a social and political storm on the islands with the rejection of entities as significant as the OCB, which accused the president of assuming the approaches of PP and Vox.

The Government argued that the requirement of Catalan caused a personnel deficit, an explanation that has deeply annoyed Armengol's partners in the Balearic Islands. The Més executive met urgently on Tuesday to demand an immediate rectification, which arrived this Wednesday. In the end, of the 4,000 places that go to stabilization, only about 200 will be exonerated from Catalan.

The Health department will now change the bases so that Catalan is a requirement in all specialties where there is no shortage of personnel, the vast majority. Health personnel will have a two-year moratorium to prove their linguistic knowledge in the event that they do not have any Catalan certification. The exemption will only affect medical specialties where there is a lack of health workers.

The OCB filed an appeal against the bases because it considered that the Public Function Law of the Balearic Islands does not allow a general exoneration, but must be fully justified. The STEI union also joined the appeal of the cultural entity for the defense of the Catalan language with the same arguments.

Until this Wednesday, the Balearic president has defended the exceptionality of the norm in health. "Health comes first", she assured this week at a press conference. Those responsible for the Servei de Salut also defended the call on the grounds that Catalan was an obstacle to recruiting staff.

These two reflections led to a strong statement from the OCB and Més, Armengol's partners, in which the president and those responsible for Health are accused of stopping the proposals of the right. In fact, the president of the Balearic PP, Marga Prohens, welcomed Armengol's change of course and even offered her votes in the Balearic Parliament to change the Civil Service Law and that Catalan be a merit and not a requirement in health .

"We will stabilize jobs, we will have the best toilets and we will respect linguistic rights", said the president this morning in plenary session of the Balearic Parliament. "This Government is very clear that it must guarantee the right of citizens, both the right to health and linguistic rights," she added.

The leader of Més, Lluís Apesteguia has regretted that the controversy has reached these levels. "We should never have gotten here. It is the confirmation of a failure; this must not happen again. We must not continue to have conflicts over language policy." Apesteguia has announced that his party will request that in the next legislature, the Public Function Law be modified to define more clearly who is exempt from the requirement of Catalan in healthcare.