The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, will meet next Monday in Brussels with the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, to try to relaunch the request for the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician to be authorized in the plenary sessions of the European Parliament.
The meeting, which will take place in the afternoon according to parliamentary sources confirmed to Europa Press, will take place after Albares sent a letter to Metsola at the end of September in which he requested a meeting to discuss this matter and asked for the adoption of an administrative agreement that allows the use of the three co-official languages in the European Parliament, as already occurs in other community institutions. The minister had already sent similar letters 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 and the Government has been demanding that the same be done in the European Parliament as well.
In his letter, Albares raised with Metsola the possibility of taking to the European Parliament Bureau the administrative agreement that allows the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician, using as arguments that in the regions where these languages are spoken live more than 20 million people, they are recognized by the Constitution and are working languages both in Congress and in the Senate.
Since his letter to Metsola there has been a small progress, since the president of the European Parliament commissioned at the beginning of October that the impact that recognizing the three co-official languages as languages of use in its plenary sessions would have be evaluated.
The task has been entrusted to the Working Group of the Board on Citizens’ Language and Linguistic Services, created last September, before Albrares’ letter, and which includes five vice-presidents of the European Parliament, including the Spaniards Esteban González Pons (PP) and Javi López (PSC).
According to the sources consulted by Europa Press at the time, the impact assessment will take “months rather than weeks” and aims to have clear data on the cost that translation in plenary sessions would entail in terms of personnel and infrastructure.
Officiality in EU
This initiative, for which the minister has requested the support of the PP on several occasions given that his political family is the majority in the European Parliament, is independent of the one initiated last summer in exchange for Junts’ support for the election of Francina Armengol as president of Congress, as the Executive has made clear.
Albares then asked the EU Council to include Catalan, Basque and Galician in the linguistic regime as official languages. For this to be possible, unanimity of the Twenty-Seven is necessary, something that has not yet been achieved given the reluctance of some partners, who fear that it could set a precedent with respect to other minority languages.
To overcome this obstacle, the Government has proposed that Spain assume the cost of translation that would be involved in the inclusion of these three new languages, which would be added to the 24 that are already official in the EU. According to estimates from Brussels, the bill would amount to 132 million euros per year.
Furthermore, given the reluctance of some partners, Albares has threatened to take this issue to the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) “if necessary”, although he has acknowledged that we are still “far” from reaching that point and that there are no “real obstacles” to the official status of Catalan, Basque and Galician becoming a reality.
The minister has repeatedly stated that the Government is doing everything in its power to achieve official status for Catalan, Basque and Galician, but these efforts do not seem to be reaching the public.
A survey published this week by the Generalitat of Catalonia reveals that 59% of Catalans believe that the Government has not done “everything it could” to achieve official status for Catalan in the EU, while 37% think the opposite and 4% do not answer.
