The government of Alfonso Rueda cannot get the word consensus out of its mouth. He often repeats it to refer to the Galician language and its standardization, which, he assures, “is outside the political debate”. His Minister of Culture and Language, José López Campos, took office in May calling on the opposition to reach a “language pact.” Time passed and nothing materialized. Neither the BNG nor the Socialist Party received a call from the Executive. And they do not forget that it was the Popular Party which, between 2007 and 2009, broke the political and institutional consensus on Galician, built during the Fraga era, and, for the first time since the death of Franco , reduced its presence in classrooms.
This Monday again, Rueda himself made a clean sweep of his own history and assured that, “if there was a change”, he would like it to be “based on consensus and on the basis of bilingualism cordial.” “Cordial bilingualism” is the expression that Alberto Núñez Feijóo invented to broadcast the events that his party carried out with him as leader: he launched into the mobilizations of an association against the teaching of Galician – in the One of them, in 2009, Rueda himself – and, during his first term, imposed an educational decree prohibiting its use in scientific subjects. It is precisely this law, approved alone by the PP with all the other parties, unions or cultural institutions against it, which earned the Xunta de Galicia the warning from the Council of Europe last week.
The body that monitors compliance with the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, signed by Spain during Aznar’s mandates, demanded that the Galician government lift the linguistic veto in scientific subjects. He requested it as “immediate action.” Asked about this, Rueda launched into the rhetoric of consensus and cordial bilingualism during the press conference following his weekly cabinet meeting. But the calls for an agreement and a pact that the right itself broke in 2009 have not, for the moment, gone any further.
“We all want a pact but for the moment they have not made any movement”, confirms to elDiario.es the deputy Mercedes Queixas, of the BNG, “in addition, Alfonso Rueda has declared himself insubordinate to the General Plan of Linguistic Standardization [aprobado en 2004 con los votos de PP, PSdeG y BNG] and the linguistic standardization law. “Do you not intend to comply with the opinion of the Council of Europe?” Nor does he seem to pay attention to the position of the Royal Academy of Galicia (RAG), which at the time had taken to court – without success – the decree which reduced the presence of Galician in the school and which demands now to pay attention to the proposed measures. by the European body. “As the president of the Academy Víctor Freixanes said,” recognizes socialist parliamentarian Silvia Longueira, “we must be where we were before the destruction of consensus.” The Xunta has not communicated with the PSdeG to discuss the issue.
The Galician PP, against the use of the language in Congress and the Senate
In his last parliamentary intervention, the Minister of Culture and Language, José López Campos, assured that in 2025 his department would approve “a plan aimed at promoting the use of Galician in different areas of the population and in all the contexts of society. He was responding to a question from nationalist MP Mercedes Queixas. But the truth is that the signals emitted by the PP and its government are not consistent with a supposed reparation for the rupture of 2009. Alfonso Rueda’s party voted in the Galician Parliament against the use of co-official languages in Congress and in Parliament. Senate, which even aroused some resentment among the former popular Galician leaders. His senators did it again last week. And the future law on public media, in addition to reducing the democratic control of the Galician Radio and Television Company (CRTVG), opens for the first time the possibility for the entity to produce content in Spanish.
“There is no indication that they are going to back down,” laments Queixas, who assures that in the last 15 years, none of the more than 100 bills approved by the Autonomous Chamber have addressed the Galician language. In any case, the BNG considers that any new agreement involves at least the establishment of a participatory evaluation process of the General Linguistic Standardization Plan – “it must be updated, but it is still valid” – and a revision of the linguistic standardization law, approved in 1983. It also calls for the development of a new Galician decree for education that guarantees what is currently in danger: that at the end of compulsory education, the student body has full competence in the two official languages of the community. And that the clause in the future media law which opens the doors to Spanish be removed. His socialist colleague, Silvia Longueira, refers to the opinions of the Galician Royal Academy: “This is the starting point, that normality is reestablished in relation to the language that existed in the past.” The consensus that destroyed the political calculations of the PP of Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Alfonso Rueda.
