“Spain advances when it embraces its diversity,” Pedro Sánchez celebrated yesterday. With many hours of flying, and few of sleep, the acting president of the Government and leader of the PSOE, having just landed from his trip to New York, arrived at his seat in time to attend the mid-morning vote with which Congress of Deputies definitively approved their newly gained multilingualism.
A reform of the regulations of the Lower House, which together with Spanish protects the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in all its parliamentary activity, for the first time in democracy, with which Sánchez congratulated himself that Spain takes "a step more in the recognition of our linguistic plurality.”
An express reform, furthermore, endorsed in the first stages of this new legislature by an absolute majority – of 180 yeses, although one of them was the result of an error – that the leader of the PSOE will try to reissue to enable his re-election, starting from that next week the investiture of the Popular Party candidate, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, fails as planned.
“Bon dia, bos dias, egun on, good morning,” the president of Congress, Francina Armengol, opened the session early in the morning, in a plenary session in which the parliamentary debate was again expressed in Catalan, Basque, Galician and Spanish. And just at mid-morning the express processing of the reform of the regulations was completed, with an absolute majority that endorsed the absolute normalization of the use of co-official languages at the seat of national sovereignty. And that, previously, it rejected the partial and total amendments registered against it by the PP and the far-right Vox.
“This way the Parliament will be more like Spain. Recognizing diversity enriches us as a country and strengthens our democracy,” celebrated the acting Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños.
The Socialist Group, Sumar, Esquerra, Junts, EH Bildu, the PNV, the BNG and the Canary Coalition once again added an absolute majority of 179 seats in the final vote on the reform of the regulations of the new plurilingual Congress. And, on this occasion, there was also the wrong vote of a PP deputy for Ourense, Rosa María Quintana, who was for many years a councilor in the Xunta de Galicia chaired by Feijóo himself. In this way, in any case, the reform of the Congress regulations received up to 180 votes in favor. The PP, Vox and UPN only gathered 170 votes in the bloc of no to the reform.
Santiago Abascal's party was also left alone in defending its amendment to the entirety against the reform. Only the 33 far-right deputies voted in favor of his veto. The PP did not support them, and opted to abstain. Vox's amendment was defeated by an absolute majority of 179 votes. The same one that rejected the three partial amendments of the PP, although in this case Vox did add its votes to those of the Feijóo bench.
On the other hand, the PNV amendment was the only one that was successful, with 178 votes in favor, so that all parliamentary production published in Catalan, Basque and Galician has the same legal value as in Spanish.
“From today onwards, this Chamber will be like Spain, plural and plurilingual,” defended, in Catalan and Spanish, Marc Lamuà, PSC deputy for Girona. The socialist leader instead reproached the opposition of the PP and Vox. “What a smaller, weaker and reactionary Spain you draw!” he reproached the right. And he assured that “today the strong Spain is that of Pedro Sánchez.”
“Today the PSOE puts Spain up for sale!” replied the PP spokesperson, Borja Sémper. This time, after the controversy that arose in the plenary session last Tuesday in his own bench for using Basque, the Basque deputy spoke only in Spanish, except for the “egun on” with which he greeted his honorable Members.
Sémper accused the socialists of acting at the dictates of Waterloo, where Carles Puigdemont has resided since he fled Spanish justice in 2017. “The independentists demand and you grant,” he lamented. “What is the limit of Pedro Sánchez's transfers to obtain his investiture?” He questioned. “There are no limits,” he denounced. And he warned that the next payment will be amnesty for those prosecuted by the process. An alert in which the Vox spokesperson, María José Rodríguez de Millán, agreed.
The PP spokesperson, however, once again defended Spanish as a common language and for which no deputy needs simultaneous translation. And he warned the PSOE that the objective of the independence movement “is not to defend its own language, but to deny the common language.” The popular bench, led by Feijóo, wanted to bury the recent controversy and rewarded Sémper with strong applause.
