Spain has revived its effort to make Catalan, Basque, and Galician official languages of the European Union, but once again faced resistance from fellow member states. Despite managing to place the proposal back on the agenda at a meeting of European ministers on Tuesday, May 27th, no consensus was reached.
The push, spearheaded by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government, is widely seen as a political gesture to appease Catalan separatist party Junts, whose support is critical for Sánchez’s fragile minority coalition. But for many in Brussels, the proposal was doomed from the start.
“If you take Spain’s initiative to its logical conclusion, you quickly see how important it was from the get-go,” one EU observer noted.
Some EU countries expressed cautious sympathy. “We understand the importance of this issue for Spain,” said Cyprus’s deputy European affairs minister Marilena Raouna. “What is important is that it is done in a way that is legally sound and that does not create a precedent.”
That precedent is precisely what many fear. Granting official EU status to Catalan, Basque, and Galician could open the floodgates for dozens of other regional language claims, from Breton and Frisian to Neapolitan and even Russian in the Baltic states. “Making a European issue out of a national one” could backfire, warned one diplomat.
