Albares says he is “willing” to go to the CJEU to make Catalan, Basque and Galician official in Europe

Eduardo González The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, has assured that he is “willing” to go to the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) to achieve the official status of Catalan, Galician and Basque in the European institutions. During an interview with the program ‘El matí’, on Catalunya Ràdio, the minister expressed his conviction that Catalan will be spoken in the European Parliament during this legislature and that the three languages will even be official in “all” European institutions. To this end, he indicated that for “months” he has been in dialogue with the countries that are most reluctant to the official status of Catalan, Basque and Galician in Europe and, on this point, he assured that, right now +, “there is only one reluctance, and it is the political reluctance of those countries that are governed above all by the European People´s Party in coalition with the extreme right.” In this sense, he continued, the Government has been systematically asking the PP for months to stop putting obstacles to this objective and warned that, if it were not possible, Pedro Sánchez’s Executive is willing to go to court: “With the PP or without the PP, I am sure that we will achieve it, and if not, I am willing to go to the CJEU if necessary,” he declared. After Albares’ statements, the party’s spokesman, Borja Sémper, has completely rejected that the People´s Party is behind the “resistance” to making Catalan official in the European institutions and has accused Albares of lying: “The problem is not the European PP. The problem is Mr. Albares’ obsession with trying to deceive us all, and especially the pro-independence Catalans,” he said. According to Sémper, quoted by Catalunya Ràdio, Albares is the first to know that the resistance to what they propose does not come from a specific political party or a specific ideological orientation in Europe. The PP spokesperson assures that this is a cross-cutting issue, “a European norm that regulates the functioning of the institutions”, so “Mr. Albares unfortunately – and I say this with sadness because it hurts me to speak like this about a Spanish minister – is lying”. The modification of the European linguistic regime to make Catalan official, together with Basque and Galician, 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 investiture vote. For this reason, the Government took advantage of the last Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU (second half of 2023) to introduce the issue in four consecutive meetings of the General Affairs Council (September 19, October 24, November 15 and December 12, 2023), in two of which even Albares appeared, something unusual in this type of meeting. Despite this insistence, the four meetings concluded without any concrete decision, except for the commitment of the imminent Belgian Presidency to “move forward the work on Spain’s request during its mandate”. However, the question of languages was conspicuous by its absence from the agenda of all the General Affairs Councils of the Belgian semester and the topic has remained stalled since then due to legal, financial and political doubts of several Member States. On 24 June, Albares met with his Hungarian counterpart, Péter Szijjártó, to discuss how to move forward on this objective during the current Hungarian Presidency of the EU Council. Hungary’s ambassador to the EU, Bálint Ódor, declared at the same time that, in principle, his country has no intention of discussing Spain’s proposal during its Presidency. On September 6, José Manuel Albares received the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Jaume Duch (former spokesperson and director general of Communication of the European Parliament), in Madrid, with whom he promised, among other things, to strengthen the Catalan language in the European Union. Last week, the Minister of Foreign Affairs sent a letter to the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, to ask her to approve the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician as official languages in the European Parliament. This is the third time that Albares has formally asked the parliamentary leader to adopt an administrative agreement that allows the use of the three co-official languages in the European Parliament, as is already the case in other community institutions, following the letters sent in September 2022 and March 2024. Currently, there are already “administrative arrangements” within the Council and the European Commission that allow the translation of many of their documents into the co-official languages.

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