Feijóo repeats an educational and linguistic promise that he already broke in Galicia

One of the things that most degrades politics is seeing parties make promises that they have already clearly broken wherever they govern.

The great electoral promise broken by Feijóo, who now says that “what I say, I do”
A campaign against Spanish is news if it is done in Catalonia but not if it is done in Galicia

A few days ago, the newspaper El Mundo stated that the Popular Party (PP) will guarantee "the right to learn Spanish throughout the nation." According to this media outlet, the PP intends to qualify a proposal that appears in the political report of its 21st congress (see PDF), which currently states the following:

"We will ensure that national legislation guarantees the full learning of Spanish at all stages of the education system and guarantees the right to use it in all settings."

According to El Mundo, the PP has improved the wording of this proposal, guaranteeing "the constitutional right to receive education in Spanish at all stages of the educational system and throughout the nation, while respecting the co-official languages ​​of each of the communities and in compliance with court rulings."

I would be very excited reading this right now if I were an alien, if my spaceship had just landed, and if I had only just learned about Alberto Núñez Feijóo and the PP. But that's not the case. That commitment was already proposed by Feijóo and the PP in 2009, when the current national president of that party was a candidate to preside over the autonomous government of Galicia. During that election campaign, Feijóo said Galicians could choose the language their children study in. Feijóo assured: "We are going to try to continue promoting the use of Galician" but "within a framework of linguistic freedom".

I was one of the Galicians who voted for Feijóo and the PP in those elections. I did so trusting that promise. The PP won those Galician elections by an absolute majority and Feijóo became president of the Xunta de Galicia. Nine months later, Feijóo announced a model of "trilingualism" in schools that betrayed his electoral commitment. Once again, politicians were deciding for families. Today, 16 years later, that promise from Feijóo and the PP remains unfulfilled in Galicia, where the most widely taught school subjects are taught in Galician, with no choice of language for families. This isn't freedom, it's imposition.

Feijóo not only broke his promise, but three years later, to justify what he had done, he stated that linguistic freedom was like South African Apartheid, when it was precisely the fall of that racist regime that made it possible to establish linguistic freedom in South Africa. In fact, the linguistic model of that racist regime was a trilingual model very similar to the one established by Feijóo in Galicia.

Thus, what appears to be a hopeful promise from the PP is nothing more than a deception, another bait to get Spaniards to bite and entrust their vote to a party and a politician who have spent many years betraying that commitment in Galicia. The PP has shown no willingness to allow children to be educated in Spanish in Galician schools, allowing them to learn the different subjects in their mother tongue, something that would be perfectly compatible with families who prefer to educate their children in Galician being able to also exercise that right. The PP has enjoyed an absolute majority in Galicia for 16 years, allowing it to establish linguistic freedom, but it has refused to do so, so the proposal announced in its political report has no credibility.

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Photo: Partido Popular.