“Spain advances when it embraces its diversity”, Pedro Sánchez celebrated yesterday. With many hours of flight, and little sleep, the acting Prime Minister and leader of the PSOE, having just landed from his trip to New York, arrived at his seat in time to attend the mid-morning vote with the Congress of Deputies definitively approved its recently won plurilingualism.
A reform of the rules of the Lower House, which along with Spanish protects the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in all its parliamentary activity, for the first time in democracy, with which Sánchez congratulated himself that Spain “one more step in the recognition of our linguistic plurality”.
An express reform, moreover, endorsed in the first steps of this new legislature by an absolute majority – of 180 yes, although one of them was the result of an error – which the leader of the PSOE will try to reissue to enable his re-election, if next week the investiture of the candidate of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, fails, as planned.
“Bon dia, bos dias, egun on, buenos días”, the president of the Congress, Francina Armengol, opened the session early in the morning, in a plenary in which the parliamentary debate was once again expressed in Catalan, Basque, Galician and Spanish. And right at mid-morning, the express processing of the reform of the regulations culminated, with an absolute majority that endorsed the absolute normalization of the use of the co-official languages ??at the seat of national sovereignty. And that, previously, he rejected the partial and total amendments registered against by the PP and the extreme right of Vox.
“Thus the Parliament will be more like Spain. Recognizing diversity enriches us as a country and strengthens our democracy”, celebrated the acting Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños.
The socialist group, Sumar, Esquerra, Junts, EH Bildu, the PNB, the BNG and Coalició Canària again added an absolute majority of 179 seats in the final vote on the reform of the regulations of the new multilingual Congress. And, this time, there was added the wrong vote of a PP deputy for Ourense, Rosa María Quintana, who for many years was a councilor in the Xunta de Galicia chaired by Feijóo himself. In this way, therefore, the reform of the rules of the Congress received up to 180 votes in favor. The PP, Vox and UPN gathered only 170 votes in the block of no to the reform.
The formation of Santiago Abascal was left alone, moreover, in the defense of its amendment to the totality against the reform. Only the 33 far-right MPs voted in favor of his veto. The PP did not support them, and opted for abstention. Vox’s amendment was overturned by an absolute majority of 179 votes. The same one that rejected the three partial amendments of the PP, although in this case Vox had indeed added its votes to those of the Feijóo group.
On the other hand, the PNB amendment was the only one that succeeded, with 178 votes in favor, so that all parliamentary production published in Catalan, Basque and Galician has the same legal value as in Spanish.
“From today, this House will be like Spain, plural and plurilingual,” defended Marc Lamuà, PSC deputy for Girona, in Catalan and Spanish. The socialist leader instead criticized the PP and Vox opposition. “What a smaller, weaker and reactionary Spain you are drawing!”, he reprimanded the right-wing. And he affirmed that “today the strong Spain is that of Pedro Sánchez”.
“Today the PSOE is putting Spain up for sale!”, replied the PP spokesman, Borja Sémper. This time, after the controversy raised in last Tuesday’s plenary in his own group for using Basque, the Basque deputy spoke only in Spanish, except for the “egun on” with which he greeted his lordships.
Sémper accused the socialists of acting in the Waterloo dictation, where Carles Puigdemont has lived since he fled Spanish justice in 2017. “The pro-independence people demand and you concede,” he lamented. “What is the limit of transfers of Pedro Sánchez to get the investiture?”, he questioned. “There are no limits”, he denounced. And he warned that the next payment will be the amnesty for those accused of the process. An alert in which the spokeswoman for Vox, María José Rodríguez de Millán, agreed.
The spokesperson of the PP, however, once again defended Spanish as a common language and for which no deputy needs simultaneous translation. And the PSOE warned that the objective of independence “is not to defend one’s own language, but to deny the common language”. The popular group, led by Feijóo, wanted to bury the recent controversy and awarded Sémper with loud applause.
