The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, has sent a letter to the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, to ask her to approve the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician as official languages in the European Parliament.
This is the third time that Albares has formally asked Metsola to adopt an administrative agreement that allows the use of the three co-official languages in the European Parliament, as is already the case in other community institutions, after the letters sent 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.
In the letter, the minister considers that the beginning of the new legislature constitutes a “privileged opportunity” to advance in what he defines as “a priority issue” for Spain,” reports Europa Press.
Albares asks to be able to address “personally” with Metsola the possibility of her bringing to the European Parliament’s Table the administrative agreement that allows the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in it.
As an argument in favor of this step, the Minister of Foreign Affairs highlights the need to bring European institutions closer to citizens and argues that more than 20 million people live in the regions where these languages are spoken, apart from the fact that they are recognized by the Constitution and are working languages both in Congress and in the Senate.
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. 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 required. The Government took advantage of the rotating presidency that Spain held in the second half of 2023 to try to promote its proposal, but it failed to garner the necessary support, given the doubts of some partners that it could set precedents 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 Brussels estimates, the bill would amount to 132 million euros per year.
The content of the letter, dated September 18, is also known in the midst of a debate on the lack of parliamentary support for the Government after Junts announced that it would not support the spending ceiling and forced the Executive to postpone the vote scheduled for Thursday.
