Albares resumes meeting with Metsola on languages on Wednesday, which was postponed by the DANA

Eduardo González The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, will hold this Wednesday in Brussels the meeting with the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, which was postponed at the beginning of November due to the DANA crisis in the south and east of Spain. The objective of this meeting, according to official sources from Foreign Affairs informed The Diplomat, is to try to relaunch Spain's request to authorize the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in the plenary sessions of the European Parliament. Metsola's agenda for this week, published this Monday on the European Parliament website, indicates that the president will meet "with the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares." The meeting will take place at the end of the NATO ministerial meeting and after the minister sent a letter to Metsola at the end of September requesting a meeting to discuss this matter and asking for the adoption of an administrative agreement allowing the use of the three co-official languages in the European Parliament, as is already the case 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 her letter, Albares suggested to Metsola the possibility of bringing to the European Parliament's 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 recognised by the Constitution and are working languages both in Congress and in the Senate. In addition, Metsola was received last March in Madrid by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and by Albares, who recalled the importance that Spain attaches to multilingualism and the use of co-official languages in the European institutions and reiterated Spain's request to be able to use co-official languages in the plenary sessions of the European Parliament, the only main community institution with which Spain does not yet have an administrative agreement for the use of these languages. Since her letter to Roberta Metsola, there has been some progress, as the President of the European Parliament commissioned at the beginning of October an assessment of the impact that recognising the three co-official languages as languages used in its plenary sessions would have. The task has been entrusted to the Working Group of the Bureau on Citizens' Language and Linguistic Services, created last September, before Albares' 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 the Europa Press agency 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. Official status of languages This initiative, for which the minister has repeatedly requested the support of the PP 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 the Congress, as the Executive has made clear. At that time, Albares 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 due to the reluctance of some partners, who fear that it could set a precedent for 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 Brussels estimates, 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 European Court of Justice (ECJ) “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.

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