The reason for not admitting Catalan, Galician and Basque as official languages of the EU

Pedro Sánchez's government is making a colossal fool of itself in European institutions to please its separatist allies.

Sánchez wants to squander on languages three times what he refused to give to ALS patients
The left intends to degrade Spanish as a common language and El País confirms it

In 2023, the Catalan separatists of ERC and Junts made the promotion of Catalan in the European Union a condition to support Sánchez's re-election as president of the government, after his party, the PSOE, lost the 2023 general elections and depended on the support of all separatist groups and the far left to stay in power.

In order to meet this condition imposed by its separatist partners, the Sánchez government used Galician and Basque as a cover to please Junts and ERC, demanding that the European Union recognize these three Spanish regional languages as official languages in community institutions. This week, Pedro Sánchez's government has failed again in that endeavor, and it has done so causing strong tensions with other member countries, which are beginning to be fed up with the EU having to bow to the blackmail of the separatists to the Spanish government.

In December 2023, the EU warned that introducing Catalan, Basque and Galician in the European Parliament would cost 132 million euros a year, an astronomical amount but one that Sánchez doesn't mind since we Spaniards are paying for it. The Spanish socialist government's willingness to squander this money contrasts with its blocking of €38 million in aid for ALS patients so they can live with dignity, aid that two years later has still not arrived. This clearly demonstrates Sánchez's aberrant order of priorities, which systematically puts his personal interests above the real problems of the Spanish people.

In addition to the excessive economic cost, there is a basic reason for not admitting Catalan, Galician, and Basque as official languages of the EU, a reason that the Sánchez government insists on denying. That reason has to do with the official status of those three languages. Article 3 of the Spanish Constitution establishes Castilian (also called Spanish) as the sole official language of the State, adding: "All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it." That same article adds: "The other Spanish languages ​​will also be official in the respective Autonomous Communities in accordance with their Statutes".

According to current Spanish law, Catalan, Galician, and Basque are regional languages, and Spain has only one national language: Castilian Spanish. This paves the way for determining which language should represent Spain in the EU institutions. Currently, the EU has 24 official languages. There are no regional languages among them. All the languages included have the status of national languages of member countries, without any exceptions.

This very week, Spain's Foreign Minister, socialist José Manuel Albares, accused the EU of "discriminating against Spain compared to other states." This is completely false. Only four countries have two or three official languages that correspond to official languages of the European Union:

• Belgium: German, French and Dutch.
• Finland: Finnish and Swedish.
• Ireland: English and Irish Gaelic.
• Malta: English and Maltese.

In addition, Luxembourg has three official languages: French, German and Luxembourgish, but only the first two are official languages of the EU.

The Spanish left and separatists often use Belgium as an example, using it as an excuse to make Catalan, Galician, and Basque official languages. In reality, in Belgium, the official languages are German, French, and Dutch, and there are also several regional languages (Limburgish, Picard, Luxembourgish, Walloon, and others). Strictly speaking, Belgium doesn't have a national language, but in the eyes of the EU institutions, it has the advantage that its three official languages are national languages of other member countries. In fact, German, French, and Dutch were the first official languages of the EU, along with Italian, in 1958.

Obviously, Spain is not in the same situation, as it has only one national language, Castilian or Spanish. This language is spoken throughout the country and allows us Spaniards to understand each other. For two years now, the left has wanted to degrade Spanish as a national language to please its separatist allies: a huge nonsense that demonstrates the irrationality of Sánchez and his allies. Obviously, due to the conditions established by the EU for recognizing an official language, Spain should recognize Catalan, Galician, and Basque as national languages so that the EU could adopt them as official languages. That would require a constitutional reform, which Sánchez hasn't even proposed and for which he wouldn't have sufficient support.

So, on this issue, Sánchez is at a dead end, and he knows it. Continuing to insist only serves to paint a terrible image of Spain in the eyes of the other member states and to generate tensions between them. This issue has only served to demonstrate that the real problems of the Spanish people are subordinated to the separatists' demands on Sánchez's list of priorities.

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Photo: Alexandre Lallemand.