The Government of Sweden admitted this Wednesday that it has doubts regarding the incorporation of Catalan, Basque and Galician as official languages within the European Union as defended by the Spanish Executive. Nothing has been decided yet, and Stockholm points out that it has not adopted a final position on this matter, and that it will study the budgetary and operational effects that this initiative would imply. However, the doubts expressed by the Swedish Government, the first of the Twenty-seven to speak out on this matter, represent a first obstacle and cool the expectations of the Spanish Government.
In mid-August, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs addressed a letter to the Presidency of the Council of the EU, in which it defended the inclusion in the regulation that regulates the community linguistic regime of the “Spanish languages other than Spanish that enjoy status official in Spain.” The matter, as requested in said letter, was included in the agenda of the General Affairs Council of September 19.
The EU language regulation dates back to 1958 and has 24 official languages. The last to join the list was Gaelic in 2022. Any change in this regulation requires the unanimity of the Twenty-Seven, so it cannot go ahead if a single Member State objects.
Sweden has not said it opposes the measure, which is on the agenda for the next European Union Council meeting on September 19. The Swedish Executive, a coalition of conservatives, Christian Democrats and liberals with the external support of the ultras Sweden Democrats, is "undecided" regarding the aforementioned possibility of modifying Regulation number 1, which sets out which are the official languages of the EU, according to the Swedish Minister of European Affairs, Jessika Roswall. Stockholm wants to examine "further" what the "legal and financial" consequences of the proposal are. Roswall has already pointed out that "there are many minority languages that are not official within the EU."
The possible incorporation of Catalan, Basque and Galician as official languages of the EU is a demand of the Spanish Government that was promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on August 17, as part of the PSOE agreement with Junts for the constitution of the Mesa del Congress.
Spain, as the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, requested that the matter be included in the agenda of the next Council of Ministers of General Affairs, with the intention that there be a debate and an eventual vote, in the case of that unanimity is guaranteed. The ministers of European or foreign affairs of the EU member states will participate in this meeting and will allow Spain to gauge whether among its partners there is the unanimity that is needed to carry out the measure and on which it has been working for weeks, according to diplomatic sources assure.
In these conversations, several partners have doubts about the cost of the measure or the excessive speed with which the initiative is being processed, in addition to the possibility that other countries request the inclusion of other languages spoken in their territories in the list. of official EU languages.
