Education minister gets hot reception in Congress over linguistic reforms

Political groups, with the evident exception of the ruling Popular Party, on Wednesday called for the head of Education Minister José Ignacio Wert for his proposed reform to restore Castilian Spanish to the same level in the classroom as co-official regional languages such as Basque or Catalan, which have been given priority since the return to democracy after the death of Franco.

The PSC Catalan branch of the main opposition Socialist Party and the ruling Catalan center-right CiU nationalist bloc demanded that Wert step down, while Laura Mintegi, a lawmaker of the radical Basque left-wing nationalist group Bildu called for the minister’s proposed reform to be withdrawn.

Speaking in Congress the spokesman for the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) party, Alfred Bosch, said: “Even with civil guards in the classroom, schoolchildren will not cease to study Catalan.”

“We won’t be moved. We’re not going to allow them to carry out an attack against a whole country when we have had a model for 35 years without problems,” Bosch added. “You are going to come up against a nation ready to defend its children. Don´t dare touch our children. We’ve had enough; we won’t obey.”

You are going to come up against a nation ready to defend its children. Don't dare touch our children"

Along the same defiant lines, PSC lawmaker Francesc Vallès said: “If you want to touch the Catalan language, you are going to find yourself up against a whole nation. The dispute is going to be long and hard. Go before it is too late.”

Wert insisted that his proposals were not against co-official languages but rather to put into law rulings by the Supreme Court on the use of Castilian Spanish in the classroom. The minister also offered to sit down and discuss a new formula for bilingualism.

The CiU’s congressional spokesman, Josep Antoni Duran Lleida, was equally defiant, accusing the PP of a shift in its attitude toward co-official languages. “Philip V tried to put an end to Catalan and later Franco, but they didn’t succeed,” he said. “When the PP needed CiU to govern, it did not question the linguistic model; it was a time when [former] Prime Minister [José María] Aznar spoke Catalan in private and you’re now questioning this, but the language is not negotiable.”