Feijóo, with the Catalan nuisance

This man running for the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, went to Catalonia to explain something he calls Contrato con España and which amounts to the most prominent measures he intends to apply if Spain hires him as president of the government. They are a series of frighteningly stale right-wing things, which include the defense of national sovereignty (banal and not-so-banal nationalism in abundance), the "lightening" of the state (cuts in the labor, social, and cultural spheres), "ordering" immigration (a free-for-all for xenophobia and aporophobia), the "guarantee" of pensions (they want to privatize them), the "strengthening" of public healthcare (they want to cut it even further), and a stellar, dazzling measure, without which the decent folk, who are the ones Feijóo is addressing, cannot live: guaranteeing the teaching of Spanish in Catalonia, and it is understood that also in the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands, where there are also natives who insist on speaking (and teaching at school!) the Catalan language. In the clause of the "contract" referring to education, there is also a commitment assumed by candidate Feijóo that I cannot help but reproduce, because it constitutes a singular and enormous absurdity: "(...) education must reward effort, increase rigor, and reinforce the authority of the teacher. The contents will be developed by the royal academies". The royal academies do not perform and have never performed any type of educational or pedagogical work, and the work they produce has nothing to do with primary or secondary school. All that is missing now is for students to have to complete their training with a year on the Juan Sebastián Elcano.

Feijóo promises 50% Spanish in Catalan classrooms. He could promise 60, 75, or 83.74%. Talking about linguistic percentages within a classroom, and even more so within current classrooms, where a cultural and linguistic diversity that the gentlemen of the PP cannot even imagine comes together, is another absurdity. Naturally, neither the quality of the public school (they also want to dismantle it, by way of turning it into a place of conflict where no one wants to go) nor pedagogical rigor matters at all to them. It is solely about the same old thing. About the incredibly boring, ignorant, foolish, and discouraging war that the Spanish nationalist right has always had against linguistic diversity, and very particularly against the Catalan language.

The fact that this still allows them to scrape up votes in certain sectors of the electorate is a dire symptom: both in terms of the political level of this right-wing, and the consistency of the democratic culture that has developed in the Spanish state over these fifty years. But above all, it is a cosmic bore, an anachronism, a regression, and an obsessive nuisance capable of boring the dead and the stones (which tend to have patience). That in these fifty years they have not been able to advance even a millimeter in the respect for linguistic rights was something we already knew. To confirm it in the form of an electoral promise is, simply, unacceptable.