In the Santa Marta park in Santiago de Compostela, in the Conxo neighborhood, where huge blocks of modern, Nordic-looking housing have grown in recent decades, children play taking advantage of the hint of sun that has risen in the middle of the afternoon. If you stop to listen to their conversations, you notice that most of them speak in Spanish.
Conxo is a name that is associated with Galician nationalist mythology. On the banks of the Sar, just a ten-minute walk from here, is the forest where the Banquet was held in 1856, the meeting between students and artisans, which became one of the founding acts of the Rexurdimiento, the Galician movement analogous to the Catalan Renaixença .
A century and a half later, avós (grandparents), the Fontela couple, walk their granddaughter through this park. What language do they speak to her? “In Galician, of course, at home we speak Galician.” And at school? “Well I do not know. My other grandson, who is a little older, I would say that at school he speaks more Spanish. Among them they speak total Spanish, but with us they speak… We always speak Galician!”, they say, shrugging their shoulders.
Galician is a language of everyday use. If you go to the supermarket, the most normal thing is that they give you the bill in this language, even if the customer speaks Spanish. What do I owe you? “Dezaoito e nineties”. Here you go, “Moitas grazas”
As it could not be otherwise, the language has been the subject of controversy in this electoral campaign. And like almost everything in these last days of rallies, the debate has revolved around the program of the Galician Nationalist Bloc that proposes recovering the strategy that it already applied in the 2005 legislature when the Galician Socialists Party and the Bloc shared government. A strategy that in the opinion of the PP is totalitarian.
The background noise of this controversy will be familiar to Catalan readers.
In their program, the nationalists propose returning to a “complete or mainly educational offer in the Galician language” that would be gradually introduced in schools, explains Mercedes Queixas, Bloc deputy and linguist.
“What we propose is to guarantee the learning of Galician so that children can then decide which language they speak. You cannot choose if you do not know, and today knowledge in school is not guaranteed. Galician is no longer a language of scientific learning thanks to the policies of the last 15 years.”
The PP considers this proposal one more example of the “ideological dogmatism of the Bloc.” The Minister of Culture, Román Rodríguez, sticks in a conversation with La Vanguardia to the speech of his candidate, Alfonso Rueda at the rallies: “The problem is that these people first tell you what you have to talk about and at the end they tell you what you have to talk about.” think”.
“More than 80% of Galicians speak our language,” explains Rodríguez; In other communities, in Catalonia for example, they do not reach this percentage.” Rodríguez wonders why it is necessary to “impose politics on an issue as intimate as the language you speak with your people.”
And this is the point of collision: while the Bloc conceives language as an instrument of a national political project, the PP understands it as an exercise of individual freedom. Said in the words of Feijóo himself in one of the rallies that he is holding these days in Galicia: “We Galicians speak whatever we want.”
In 2010, once the Xunta government was restored, the PP approved the bilingualism decree in which it modulated the use of one language or another – Spanish or Galician – depending on the language the students spoke and the cultural context of the school. He retraced the path of the “linguistic imposition” that the left-wing bipartisan had established on the basis, and this is an important detail, of the Galician linguistic normalization law approved in 1983 – just two months after the Catalan law – under the presidency by Manuel Fraga.
The result of this PP decision has been questioned by various reports, including the Council of Europe, which estimates that Galician does not receive the protection it deserves. The Royal Galician Academy and the Consello da Cultura Galega, a consultative body of the Xunta, have expressed themselves in this same sense.
The common point of these reports, with regard to education, is that in school, instead of increasing the use of Galician, the knowledge that children acquire in their family environment is lost. So to speak, and following the example of what the Fontelas told in the Conxo park, the children speak Galician at home, but they unlearn it at school because it is not a vehicle of knowledge and relationship. A reality to which social networks are no strangers.
Queixas maintains that the problem of the PP is that it starts from an error in judgment of what is happening in Galicia. “Despite the policies that try to minorize Galician, there are young people who today want to learn that language.”
It is not disposable. If nationalist expressions, in all their ideological variables, advance in Europe, why should Galicia be left out?
Beyond the debate about language, that may be one of the keys to the outcome next Sunday.
