The Majorca Narrative Prize awarded by the Consell de Mallorca, which became the prize with the highest financial endowment in Catalan, with 70,000 euros, will be bilingual from next year. It is one of the first linguistic twists of a Balearic institution since the change of government took place as a result of the pact between the PP and Vox after the regional elections last May.
It’s not the only one. The programmatic agreements reached by the two political parties have meant that a few days ago the Palma city council amended the language regulations that had been in force for more than 30 years to guarantee that the institution must answer in Spanish to all citizen requests that are present in this language. Until now, it only had to do so if the citizens sent an express request to the corporation to request that the communications be in Spanish.
The agreement was reached in a plenary session of the town hall in which it was agreed that the Internet domain should stop being palma.cat to be palma.es. Works in Spanish will also be able to be presented at the Ciutat de Palma Awards as of this year’s edition, some awards that until now only rewarded works in Catalan.
The change in the linguistic regulations and in the Internet domain started from a Vox motion that went ahead with their votes and those of the PP, but they are nothing more than the spearhead of a profound transformation in the institutional uses of Catalan and the Castilian that have historically been maintained on the islands with a brief exception during the ephemeral mandate of José Ramón Bauzá.
The purpose of Vox is for Spanish to become the daily communication tool in the institutions and the PP has had no choice but to accept it to forge a pact that has allowed the popular Marga Prohens to rule alone. These first gestures will be accompanied by measures of much greater depth and the main one is that Prohens has already announced that, at the end of the legislature, parents will be able to choose the language in which their children will study.
It was the main demand of Vox to make Prohens president of the Government. The popular program included offering parents the possibility of choosing the language of primary education, but the pact extends this possibility to all educational stages. For the moment, it will not be applied in this school year, but the application will be progressive from the next one. Prohens has chosen Antoni Vera, a graduate in Catalan Philology, whom she considers a moderate.
The displacement of Catalan in favor of Spanish will also begin to be noticed in healthcare. The PP program included the suppression of the requirement of Catalan to be a health worker. Catalan will no longer be a requirement to be a health teacher and will become a merit, despite the fact that current regulations require Catalan, but give professionals two years to obtain the title once they have obtained the position.
The new institutional representatives of the islands have not clarified, for now, if this suppression of the requirement of Catalan will be extended to the entire public administration and Catalan will no longer be a requirement to access the public service. The PP does not clarify for now if this will be the case despite the fact that the public statements of the Vox leaders go in this direction.
José Ramón Bauzá, who was president of the Balearic Islands between 2011 and 2015 before joining Ciudadanos, eliminated this requirement and changed the educational model to implement a trilingual system. This measure caused the largest demonstration in the history of the Balearic Islands, with more than 100,000 people in the streets of Palma. Bauzá lost the elections clearly shortly after.
Vox is the one who is marking the step in the new language policy of the Islands and wants everything agreed to be fulfilled. The representatives of the ultra-right formation do not trust that Prohens will comply with everything agreed, hence another of their demands was the creation of the Office for the Guarantee of Linguistic Freedom “to defend the freedom of linguistic use and choice and to promote the protection of both Spanish and Catalan and the linguistic modalities of the different islands”, according to the agreement between PP and Vox.
This Office replaces the Office for the Defense of Linguistic Rights and its director will be a member of Vox, so it will be the only institutional position of this party on the islands. His election will be made in Parliament, which is the institution on which the new body will formally depend.
PP and Vox have also agreed to create a commission to monitor the agreements, which must meet every two months. The purpose is to guarantee that Prohens complies with the pact with more than 100 points that favored the abstention of Vox so that she was president alone.