Eduardo González
The Spanish Government will present today, during the meeting of the General Affairs Council (GAC) of the EU, an official memorandum with Spain’s “solid and legitimate” arguments to request that Catalan, Basque and Galician be official languages of the Union, as reported yesterday in Brussels by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares.
“This memorandum has already been distributed,” declared the minister upon his arrival at the EU Foreign Affairs Council, which was held yesterday in Brussels, one day before the second GAC of the Belgian Presidency, which includes on its agenda a “change of impressions” on Spain’s proposal to modify the regulation “by which the linguistic regime of the European Economic Community is established.”
“Both the European institutions and all EU partners” recognize that “Spain’s arguments for requesting that Basque, Catalan and Galician be official languages of the EU are solid and legitimate,” Albares continued. “Now they are all in a single document, black on white, which was distributed last Friday as an official document of the Council and, therefore, no one will be able to say that they need more time for reflection or that they have not known them,” he added. “It has been at the table of the General Affairs Council for many months now,” but “tomorrow (today) we take one more step,” declared Albares. “There are no vetoes, of course,” because if there were “we wouldn’t be able to carry it,” he said.
“I believe that it has already been clear to all our partners, but it will be even clearer to them tomorrow (for today), that this is a demand that the Government of Spain is not going to abandon, because it is our national identity and because the EU “It must protect both the national identity of all States and multilingualism,” Albares warned. “There is a constitutional reality in Spain, very particular within the multilingual regime of many countries in Europe, that Europe cannot ignore,” he added.
Likewise, the minister asked the People’s Party, as it has already done “in parliamentary headquarters on many occasions in Madrid, in the EU Commission, in the Foreign Affairs Commission”, to “collaborate and support this demand of the Government of Spain”, because “it is part of a family that is mostly represented around the table of the European Council, and has many MEPs.” “If the People’s Party wanted, tomorrow, at the table of the European Parliament, we could convert Catalan, Basque and Galician into working languages, and if it would help us to continue explaining better to the countries represented in the Council of its family politics, we could also achieve that official status,” he said.
The modification of the European linguistic regime to make Catalan, Basque and Galician official 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.
For this reason, the Government took advantage of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU to introduce the topic 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 the commitment to refer the matter to the future Belgian Presidency. The agenda of the first GAC of the Belgian semester, held on January 29, did not include the official status of the Spanish co-official languages in the Union, but the matter does appear on the agenda of tomorrow’s GAC.
