<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>This week's European agenda is very interesting for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as it will address two of the most important issues for the Department headed by José Manuel Albares: the International Conference on Financing for Development in Seville and the officialization of the Catalan, Basque, and Galician languages in the European institutions.</strong></h4> On the one hand, this Monday the meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council on Development will take place in Brussels, where Spain will be represented by the State Secretary for International Cooperation, Eva Granados, according to sources from the Ministry confirmed to <em>The Diplomat</em>. One of the highlights of the meeting (the first Foreign Affairs Council on Development of the current High Representative, Kaja Kallas) will be financing for development. In this regard, the EU Council noted that the ministers will meet "one month before the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, to be held from 30 June to 3 July 2025 in Seville," and will address "new and emerging issues, the urgent need to fully implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the ongoing reform of the international financial system." The Seville meeting, the Council continued, "will take place against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving global environment, marked by rising geopolitical tensions and exacerbated by the US suspension of foreign aid, which has put enormous pressure on global development financing." The IV International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4), an event that has been mentioned almost systematically in all international meetings and statements by the Spanish Government since its announcement in July 2024, will have as its main objective the mobilization of funds for the 2030 Agenda. The first three conferences were held in Monterrey in 2002, in Doha in 2008, and in Addis Ababa in 2015. The Seville Conference was already discussed during the last informal meeting of the Development Cooperation officials of the 27 EU Member States, held on February 10 and 11 in Warsaw within the framework of the Polish Presidency of the EU Council, which was also attended by Eva Granados. <h5><strong>Languages</strong></h5> On the other hand, the State Secretary for the European Union, Fernando Sampedro, will participate this Tuesday, also in Brussels, in the meeting of the General Affairs Council (GAC). The Polish Presidency has included on its agenda the debate on "Spain's request to include Catalan, Basque, and Galician in Regulation No. 1/1958, which regulates the EU's language regime." In this regard, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, told the press last Tuesday in Brussels, before meeting with his EU counterparts, that this issue is being considered, "at Spain's request, for adoption by the General Affairs Council." He assured that Spain is "working with all delegations" to achieve "unanimity" among "all Member States" in favor of the proposal. On January 29, José Manuel Albares stated that his Polish counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski, had committed to including the issue of the official status of Catalan, Basque, and Galician in the European institutions on the agenda of the current Polish Presidency, submitting it to the "decision of all EU Member States." A week later, Albares addressed the issue of Spanish co-official languages with the Danish Minister of European Affairs, Marie Bjerre, whose country will hold the Presidency of the EU Council starting July 1. Changing the EU's language regime requires the unanimous support of all 27 Member States. Some countries have expressed reservations, and even outright opposition, for practical reasons (its financial cost and the difficulty of finding sufficient staff) and its potential impact on other Member States with minority languages. To convince the most reluctant partners, Spain has relied on the "exceptional nature" and "specificity of the Spanish case," which cannot be extrapolated to other cases, and has committed to assuming the costs. The officialization of Catalan (and, incidentally, Basque and Galician) within the European Union was one of the commitments made by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and the Catalan pro-independence Junts to secure their support in the investiture vote. Therefore, the government took advantage of Spain's last Presidency of the EU Council (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), two of which were attended by Albares himself, something unusual in this type of meeting. Despite this insistence, the four meetings concluded without any concrete decisions, except for the commitment of the incoming Belgian Presidency to "move forward work on Spain's application during its mandate." However, the issue of languages was conspicuously absent from the agenda of all the General Affairs Councils during the Belgian semester, and it did not appear even once during the subsequent Hungarian Presidency.
