The pact with JxCat makes the Government of Spain request to the Council of the European Union that Catalan, Basque and Galician become official languages. This was stated by Minister Albares, who presented the petition just before the vote in Congress, to address the "advance payment" of President Puigdemont's party in the negotiation with the PSOE, given its breaches in this area: in 2004 of Zapatero and in 2022 Pedro Sánchez.
Spain joined the EEC in 1986 and in 1990 the European Parliament (EP) already approved, with 182 votes in favor and only one against, the use of Catalan by the European Commission, promoted by MEPs Carles Gasòliba (CiU). and Antoni Gutiérrez-Díaz (PSUC). Since then, each legislature has worked to achieve its official status and today I want to remind Pablo Iglesias who in 2014 added the five Podemos MEPs to our petition.
In 2012 and 2017, respectively, the presidents of the EP, Martin Schulz and Antonio Tajani, publicly committed to authorizing the use of Catalan, conditional on receiving a proactive request from the Spanish government that, until now, had never happened. Schulz, an enthusiastic reader of Jaume Cabré, was openly in favor of it, and Tajani conditioned it on its use in Congress. Regarding its cost: today machine translation programs are quite developed, waiting for artificial intelligence to make the software even more efficient and cheaper.
Today, the Internet allows an unprecedented spread of Catalan: the Twitter account of FC Barcelona in Catalan reaches 8.15 million followers. The group The Tyets has surpassed one million monthly downloads on Spotify with theirs Coti x Coti: never before had any group in Catalan achieved it. And you only have to take a tour of Tiktok to see how people from all over the world, in a few months, speak Catalan thanks to social networks: on Instagram, the Daily Catalan account stands out, among others.
The PP will make a mistake if it once again weaves a legal web in the courts to torpedo Catalan in the EU and in Congress, as it did with the campaign against the Statute of Catalonia in 2006. Núñez Feijóo, who has spent his entire political career in Galician, he has the opportunity to reverse the secular linguistic anti-Catalanism of the Spanish right, which Cambó complained about 100 years ago.
Spain has shown great negotiating capacity for its interests in Brussels when it has thrown all the meat on the grill, for example, avoiding sanctions for its systematic breaches of public deficit and debt limits. On September 19, Pedro Sánchez can obtain historic approval for Catalan from the Council, given that the State Attorney does not see legal problems in his request for official status in the EU, according to Minister Albares. And express reforms of the Spanish Constitution, if necessary, PSOE and PP already have experience: on August 23, 2011, article 135 was modified, to establish that the payment of the public debt has "absolute priority" over other payments of the State.
Ten years ago, Commissioner Almunia, a supporter of the use of Catalan in Europe, told me that "federalism is speaking the language of the other". Now, in the interest of the PSOE, Catalan is closer than ever to historical recognition and Spain can overcome a shameful ban and age-old discrimination. Let's take advantage of it to make it possible.
