When the current Minister of Culture and Language, José López Campos, took office last May, he announced a change. Fifteen years after the Popular Party of Feijóo and Rueda unilaterally broke the existing parliamentary consensus on Galician, López Campos, from the same party, assured that he intended to recover the agreements on the issue and called for a “Pact for the Lingua.” The months passed and this Tuesday the coordinator of the cultural sector of the PP leadership, Daniel Chapela, presented his resignation due, according to him, to the “incompetence” of the advisor to manage the situation. He did this amid strong criticism that he reaffirmed in a conversation with elDiario.es: “A stone would be more useful than the current head of Culture and Lingua.” [del Gobierno gallego]”.
Chapela also left the conservative party, although he will retain his mandate as municipal councilor in Bueu, a town in O Morrazo (Pontevedra) where he was born 25 years ago. “I made this decision after thinking about it for a long time,” he says, but adds that what happened last Sunday broke his patience. And what happened on Sunday was that thousands of people filled Praza da Quintana, in Santiago de Compostela, summoned by the Vamos Galego platform, to demand a change of course in linguistic policy of the County of Galicia. The demonstration was also attended by opposition leaders Ana Pontón, from the BNG, and José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, from the PSdeG.
“I do not share the councilor’s criticism of this demonstration. What you have to do is take note and work,” says Chapela, who adds: “You cannot come out and say that, since the PSOE was present at the demonstration, they want monolingualism in Galician. » If you do this, consider yourself blowing up bridges, instead of building them. He also doesn’t like another refrain of the popular debate on language, that which accuses the nationalists of the Bloc of “being the Galician police”. “In politics, the way things are said is important,” he emphasizes. Especially if you are looking for meeting points. The advisor has already met the political forces represented in the regional Parliament, but has not put forward specific objectives. Socialists and nationalists demand the repeal of the so-called decree on multilingualism, promoted by Feijóo and which caused Galician to decline in schools for the first time since the fall of the dictatorship, and the resumption – updated – of the General Plan language standardization agreed in 2004.
The second seems to be a mistake for Chapela. “It’s a project from 20 years ago, we need a future for the Galician,” he summarizes. The first thing, repealing the regulations approved by Feijóo in 2010, is, according to him, the essential symbolic step to move forward in rebuilding the consensus. “A standard is not going to solve the problems of Galician,” he admits, “but politics is symbolic, and what greater symbolism than not putting barriers to the language.” The 2010 law banned the use of Galician in science subjects and limited the subjects that could be taught in this language to one third. But it is the latest report from the Galician Institute of Statistics (IGE) that has caused movements: the Galician government has intensified its speech of implicit rectification, even combined with nods from President Alfonso Rueda to the ultratheses, Vamos Galego organized his demonstration, and A deaf malaise – assures Chapela – crosses the popular bases.
“Within the Popular Party, there is a desire to promote Galician,” he says. The day the IGE published that a third of children between 5 and 14 years old do not know Galician, a figure that doubled under the mandates of Rueda and Feijóo, Chapela was having coffee with a Spanish-speaking PP advisor. “I told him the news and his response was ‘something has to be done, we can’t continue like this’. Many other people in the party have written to me since I made my departure public. There has a fatigue of not working more for the Galician”, he affirms Councilor López Campos also addressed him, but through the media He declared that “nothing has changed”, that. ‘he didn’t know Chapela’s reasons and that there were surely ulterior motives. “I fear that he will say that”, quips the resigner, “because he announces a pola lingua pact and then he goes. proves that there is nothing.” What exists, according to him, is a fundamental ideological question: a leadership of those who do politics in Galicia that thinks of Madrid and does not think of Galicia.
