Alberto Núñez Feijóo speaks Galician in public on a regular basis when he is in Galicia, and if the socialist plans go as planned, the president of the PP could also use this language in the Congress of Deputies during the debate on his investiture, on the 26th and September 27. The PSOE wants to speed up its commitment to the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in Congress in this legislature, an announcement made by the president of the Chamber herself, Francina Armengol, in her first speech, and the Socialists are already preparing a express reform of the regulation to make it possible, which they trust will be approved by the last week of September.
The idea that the PSOE is considering, according to socialist sources, is to register a proposal to reform the regulation this week, so that it can be admitted by the Congress Table -with a majority of the PSOE and Sumar- at its meeting next Tuesday and that processed by the urgent procedure, which allows parliamentary deadlines to be cut in half.
However, the content of the text of the reform is being agreed with the parliamentary groups. The logical thing, the aforementioned sources point out, is that a consensus text will be reached this week to start the process next week. If there are delays, it will be necessary to convene another meeting of the Bureau.
For the rapid approval of the proposal to reform the regulation, which is like a law and has an organic nature, it will be necessary to do so urgently. It will be necessary to convene two extraordinary plenary sessions -since the plenary session calendar is not set-, one for the reading and the other for the final vote, with a period between the two for allegations, sources from Congress explain. If the text is approved in a single reading, it would not be necessary for it to go through the Regulation commission, which has not yet been constituted.
In parallel, it would be necessary to hire translators who are in charge of translating the interventions into Spanish for the deputies who need to make use of this service. In the Senate, where the co-official languages ??can be used in certain interventions since 2005, they have a team of interpreters who provide their service externally and belong to an employment exchange after an examination by the Upper House. A similar system could be transferred to Congress, although for the full investiture the administrative process should be streamlined, with emergency contracts that would be paid with the surplus fund available to the Chamber.
The Congress regulations, in their current wording, do not prohibit the use of co-official languages, but in practice their use has been limited by the different presidents of the Table, who to a greater or lesser extent have allowed deputies to make appointments or short phrases from the lectern in Catalan, Basque or Galician but not an entire intervention.
The objective of the reform is for the regulations to make it explicit that deputies may use any of the four official languages. Thus, its use will be regulated even more broadly than it is right now in the Senate, where Catalan, Basque and Galician can be used since 2005 but only in some interventions.
