Rather than give in to pressure from the right, Alberto Núñez Feijóo reiterated his tepid speech on language policy this Monday, a day after he dodged a new photo of Colón at the Barcelona demonstration to step up Spanish teaching in Catalonia. The leader of the PP has criticized Pedro Sánchez’s government for “allowing” and “stopping” in the face of the “shameless contempt” of the sentences requiring 25% of Spanish lessons in Catalan classrooms and has promised to do so if the government he won’t do the same. But he has also sent a message to the hardest sectors of the right and his rivals at Vox and Ciudadanos by demanding a separate path on the matter. “We will defend all our languages with the tools of the rule of law and we will do it our way,” Feijóo said at an informative breakfast in Madrid. “Intolerance is not fought with more intolerance. We love freedom and want to hear it in all our languages and of course in the common language of our state.”
“In the end, it’s about compliance with the constitution, everyone’s. With great support in Catalonia, by the way,” said Feijóo, who spoke on his own initiative on the subject in his short speech in which he introduced Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, President of Andalusia, who was the protagonist of the breakfast. He has done so in the face of criticism he woke up to this morning in the conservative press for his “ambiguous” position on the defense of Castile in Catalonia, after failing to be present at Sunday’s demonstration and defending himself in his closing speech of the interparliamentary meeting of the PP on the subject of “language friendliness” in Catalan education.
This Monday, Feijóo also responded to right-wingers who question his commitment to Castilian in Catalonia, promising to honor the courts’ rulings. “Some want to make Spanish a foreign language in Catalonia and the government agrees. We will not. Some want to turn the Catalan school into a laboratory from which to encourage impoverished monolingualism, and the government tolerates this. We will not. Some shamelessly flout the verdicts and the government is stuck. We won’t do that,” he said. But phrases like “impoverishment of monolingualism” and “linguistic cordiality” stand out in his speech, as does his emphasis on equating Catalan and Spanish as constitutional languages to be defended, creating bubbles in some sectors of the right.
The Galician trilingual model
The leader of the PP agrees on this issue with his own experience as president of an autonomous community with its own language. Their model for Catalonia, as official PP sources explain, is precisely to export the Galician model. In Galicia, Feijóo introduced a trilingual model with Galician, Spanish and English with a 33% share in each language. In Catalonia, where there is a model of linguistic immersion, the debate stems from the Generalitat’s refusal to authorize at least 25% of the teaching of Spanish, as set out in various court rulings. Feijóo’s plan would increase the proportion of Spanish students in Catalonia to 33%, but that is not the proposal of some sectors of the right, who are calling for courses to be only in Spanish and for parents to have free choice.
In his short time as leader of the PP – he has been at the helm of the party for almost half a year – Feijóo has flirted with the most fiery discourses, for example when he said that there was “linguistic apartheid” in Catalonia, but even if his Having waved the flag of Spanish at competitors in Barcelona, he now bucks the confrontational rhetoric and opts for soft words. At the moment, the most centralist sectors in the PP are keeping a low profile in the face of Feijóo’s speech. Nobody wants to frolic in the garden. The President of the Autonomous Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has acknowledged that perhaps more clarity is needed, but she also defended Feijóo this Monday. “The PP has to be clear, if it’s not clear enough, it has to repeat it, make it so clear. It is our duty to respect court decisions and the constitution, we must not let the judiciary say something so fundamental,” he said in an interview with Esradio. “I have absolute faith in what President Feijóo is saying. Everything is questioned, you have to give him a truce, a margin, he just arrived”.
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The leader has the firm support of more moderate barons on this issue, such as Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, who was spotted this Monday in Madrid with the leader at a breakfast attended by numerous former PP ministers. Among them the former vice-president of the government, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, who does not usually attend events of this type since she left politics. The general feeling in the PP is that Feijóo is doing well and the popular leader has enough internal auctoritas to deliver a language risky speech for the right. The centrist strategy is also in the background. Moreno Bonilla recalled this Monday before Feijóo: “There is a big highway through the center and if we know how to take it we will have big majorities.”
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