The main standard bearer of left-wing politics in Europe, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez, is in a sticky spot.
One of the prime minister’s closest advisers in his centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party was recently implicated in a scandal related to kickbacks and public construction contracts.
A reshuffle of senior positions in the party compounded the controversy: one promoted official was forced to step down almost immediately after allegations of past sexual harassment came to light.
Sánchez has a knack for shaking off controversies, but this one has him in bad need of a win. He is hoping to get one in Brussels, by securing recognition for Catalan, Basque and Galician as official working languages of the European Union.
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Sánchez’s minority government relies on several smaller parties from Catalonia and other regions to stay in power. Pushing for Catalan and other regional languages to be given EU status is one condition of their continued support.
Catalan is spoken in Barcelona and the wider region of Catalonia, where separatist politicians tried to declare independence in 2017, prompting a heavy-handed crackdown from a previous conservative government in Madrid. Basque is a language in a northern region that includes Bilbao, and Galician is spoken in a pocket of the northwest of the country.
All three have been official languages in Spain since 1978, meaning people in those regions can interact with the public administration there in Spanish or the local language.
The proposal from the Sánchez government would see Catalan, Basque and Galician join the existing 24 working languages of the EU.
The change would require the mountain of EU laws and regulations to be translated into the three languages. Interpretation services would also be provided to translate speeches in the European Parliament in real-time, to allow other MEPs to follow what is being said.
Spain asked the other EU states to back recognition of the languages at a meeting of ministers in Brussels this May, but were rebuffed. They came back to it last week, again without success.
Spanish diplomats have been lobbying behind the scenes to garner support. Foreign minister José Manuel Albares has also been hitting the phones to try to convince his counterparts in other capitals.
Spain has had to first knock back concerns about the financial implications of its proposal. To tot up the likely cost of granting recognition, EU officials looked at the experience of phasing in Irish as an official language.
Irish was granted status as a working language in 2007, but due to a shortage of translation staff a derogation was put in place, to allow a lengthy run-in time before EU texts would need to be available in Irish, which ended at the start of 2022.
An internal assessment by the European Commission, seen by The Irish Times, said the estimated cost of translation and interpretation services to provide Irish as a full working language was about €44 million a year.
Correspondence from a senior commission official to Spanish diplomats in late 2023, said those figures suggested it would cost roughly €132 million a year to have Catalan, Basque and Galician as working EU languages.
The official noted there would probably be a phasing-in period, while translation capacity was built up inside the EU institutions over several years, before those full costs were felt.
The Spanish government has promised to foot the bill, rather than having the money come from the EU’s budget. Some in Brussels question whether that commitment would stand in the event of a change of government in Madrid.
The centre-right People’s Party are confident of winning the next election and have used the recent controversies to heap pressure on Sánchez to call a snap poll, well before the government’s term is due to end in 2027.
Germany is opposed to Spain’s proposal, as are Italy and some Baltic States, who are concerned about the precedent the recognition of the regional languages could set for dialects and other minority languages. Internal EU legal advice has also raised some questions for Spain, one source briefed on closed-door discussions said.
In a paper circulated to other countries to address some of the criticisms, Spain proposed that a language only be considered for status if it was officially recognised in that member state before it had joined the EU.
Xavier Bettel, minister for foreign affairs in Luxembourg, questioned whether it was the right time to be focusing on the working languages of the EU, when the union was struggling to agree a joint response to Israel’s war in Gaza, or unanimously back harsher economic sanctions on Russia. “I think the momentum is not really the right one if we are not able to agree on anything else,” he said.
Speaking last week in Brussels, Spain’s foreign minister, Albares, said his government planned to keep its request for recognition of Catalan, Basque and Galician firmly on the table.
