The Government will only propose to its European partners to vote on its proposal to include Catalan, Galician and Basque among the Union's official languages when it has "guarantees" of their approval, explained yesterday the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, in the face of harsh criticism from Junts and ERC that the initiative will not be approved today. "It's the umpteenth scam in Spain", says Quim Torra.
A key document to take that step and put the proposed reform of the Community language system to the EU for a vote is the report of the Council's legal services, which Spain has already requested. The legal framework of the reform proposed by Spain limits its effects to its co-official languages, explains Albares in the letter sent yesterday to his European colleagues. "From the conversations held" in November "I deduced that for several Member States it was important to have a clear legal framework that established the requirements that a language had to meet in order to be included in Regulation 1/1958", says the letter, to which La Vanguardia has had access, before detailing the five basic conditions that must be met and that only occur in Spain.
"There is an open dialogue with the Council's legal services to present a solid proposal that can be inserted into the European linguistic framework" and with "guarantees that it can go ahead", explained Albares in Brussels, where yesterday he participated in the meeting of EU foreign ministers and the General Affairs Council (CAG) meets today, the forum where the Spanish proposal has been being debated since September, first at a political level and, since last week, in the working groups. Incorporating answers to the comments and criticisms received, the Government intends that "the Spanish proposal of 19 September will one day be the proposal of the Twenty-seven.
Although the provisional agenda of the CAG indicated that the Spanish presidency of the Council was proposing a vote on the initiative, on Sunday, during the meeting of ambassadors of the Twenty-seven, it was reported that finally today there would only be a discussion on the subject. This decision, much criticized by indepentism which considers that it reveals a lack of will and commitment to the officiality of Catalan, responds to "the classic way of functioning that the EU has", replied Albares, who recalled that Ireland it took "more than two years" to get the recognition of Gaelic as the official language of the Union despite the fact that it was a simpler case, since it already had treaty language status.
The reform must be approved unanimously and a hasty vote, before having the certainty that all the delegations will support it, far from promoting the initiative, would make it return to the starting box. If it is rejected, it would be more complicated to place it back on the Council's agenda since it would be necessary to justify that there are new elements or internal movements that justify it. But the end of the semester of the Spanish presidency of the Council of the EU on December 31 does not imply that the subject will disappear from the agenda, the Government insists, contrary to what the pro-independence parties suspect and diplomatic sources in some capitals suggest European When it considers it necessary, Spain will request its inclusion in the agenda of the CAG to the next presidency.
While Portugal, Romania, Cyprus and Slovakia have expressed their willingness to support the reform, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania and Latvia, among others, have made their reservations clear from the outset. Italy has been skeptical. Germany and France, on the other hand, have chosen to let the Government do it and limit themselves to asking that the proposal be thoroughly analyzed from a technical and legal point of view. In general, however, the reception has been much less cold than in 2005 and in some countries of the European hard core there is even "understanding" towards the "favor" that Madrid is asking for, as long as its impact is limited and they ensure that expanding the number of official languages from 24 to 27 will not slow down the entry into force of the new EU legislation. "It is not on the wrong track", point out European diplomatic sources.
