Albares takes up the issue of co-official languages in view of the upcoming Polish presidency

Eduardo González The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, has asked his Polish counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski, to take up the Spanish proposal to make Catalan, Basque and Galician official in the European institutions during the next Polish EU Council presidency, according to the Europa Press agency and confirmed by diplomatic sources to The Diplomat. According to the same sources, Albares made this request to Sikorski through a letter sent this week. Poland will hold the rotating Presidency from 1 January and throughout the first half of 2025. It so happens that Albares and Sikorski met this Thursday in Berlin on the occasion of the meeting of the G5+, the support group for Ukraine formed at the end of November by Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom, but there is no record of them having discussed this issue personally. However, Albares did take advantage of his recent trip to Rome this past Wednesday, on the occasion of the State visit of the King and Queen, to personally discuss the Spanish proposal with his Italian counterpart, Antonio Tajani. According to the aforementioned diplomatic sources, the efforts of Foreign Affairs in favour of the three co-official Spanish languages are “constant and uninterrupted”. José Manuel Albares himself made the same efforts in the last week of June with his Hungarian counterpart, Péter Szijjártó, a few days before the start of the current Hungarian Presidency of the EU Council. Hungary's ambassador to the EU, Bálint Ódor, declared around the same time that, in principle, his country had no intention of discussing Spain's proposal during its Presidency, a warning that was later confirmed. The issue did not appear on the Council's agenda even once during the Hungarian presidency. The modification of the European language regime to make Catalan, along with Basque and Galician, official within the European Union was one of the commitments between the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the Catalan separatists 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 (19 September, 24 October, 15 November and 12 December 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. Last September, Albares assured that he was “willing to go” to the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) to obtain the official status of Catalan, Galician and Basque in “all” European institutions and he assured, after addressing this issue for “months” with the countries most reluctant to the proposal, that “only” there remained “one reluctance, and it is the political reluctance of those countries that are governed above all by the European Popular Party in coalition with the extreme right”. The modification of the linguistic regime of the EU requires the unanimous support of the 27 member states. Some countries have expressed doubts, and even open opposition, for practical reasons (its economic cost and the problems of finding sufficient staff) and for its possible impact on other Member States with minority languages. To convince the most reticent partners, Spain has relied on the “exceptionality” and “specificity of the Spanish case”, which cannot be extrapolated to other cases, and has committed to assuming the costs. Last Monday, the former president and Catalan independence leader Carles Puigdemont criticised Pedro Sánchez’s “absolute lack of involvement” in the negotiations to convince the most reticent European countries to recognise Catalan as an official language of the EU.

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