Albares addresses with the future Hungarian Presidency the official status of Catalan, Basque and Galician

Eduardo González The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, met yesterday with his Hungarian counterpart, Péter Szijjártó, to address Spain's proposal to make the Catalan, Basque and Galician languages official within the EU and the way to advance this objective during the next Magyar Presidency of the Council of the EU. “Meeting with my Hungarian counterpart, Péter Szijjártó,” Albares declared through his official account on the social network X, in a message transmitted in Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician. “We have talked about Spain's priority for Catalan, Basque and Galician to be official in the EU and how to address it during the next Hungarian Presidency of the EU Council,” he continued. “We have agreed to work together towards this goal,” he concluded. The meeting took place in Luxembourg, on the margins of the EU Foreign Affairs Council (FAC). The modification of the European linguistic regime to make Catalan, Basque and Galician official within the European Union was one of the commitments between the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the Catalan independentists of Junts to obtain their support in the vote of investiture. For this reason, the Government approved the last Spanish Presidency of the EU Council (second half of 2023) to introduce the topic in four consecutive meetings of the General Affairs Council (September 19, October 24, November 15 and December 12), in two of which even Albares compared, something unusual in this type of meeting. Despite this insistence, the four meetings (including the one in December, the last in which Spain had the possibility of putting this issue on the agenda) concluded without any concrete decision, except for the commitment of the imminent Belgian Presidency to "advance the work on Spain's request during his mandate.” However, the issue of languages was conspicuous by its absence from the agenda of all the General Affairs Councils of the Belgian semester and the issue has remained stagnant since then due to the legal, financial and political doubts of several Member States. Last week, Hungary's ambassador to the EU, Bálint Ódor, declared that, in principle, his country has no intention of debating Spain's proposal during its Presidency, which will begin on July 1 and end on December 31. "There is no intention," although "if there is a need to debate it, we will put it on the agenda," said the ambassador, reported by the Efe agency. To convince the rest of the European partners, Spain came to present an “adapted” proposal by which it undertook to assume the costs of translation and interpretation of the three languages in the EU and made it very clear that the reform would be limited “exclusively to the case of Spain” and, therefore, would not give rise to other languages being protected “in this reform if the Member State does not wish to do so.” Last March, Albares asked the Joint Commission for the European Union for the support of all parliamentary groups in Congress and the Senate so that the official Spanish languages “become official languages of the EU.” Likewise, he announced that he had sent a new letter to the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, to request the use of the official Spanish languages (Catalan, Basque and Galician) in the plenary session of the European Parliament.

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