Feijóo, with the Catalan nuisance

This man who is running for the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, went to Catalonia to explain something he calls Contrato con España and which amounts to the most notable measures he intends to implement if Spain hires him as president of the government. They are a series of dreadfully stale right-wing things, which include the defense of national sovereignty (banal nationalism and not so banal in abundance), the “lightening” of the state (cuts in the labor, social, and cultural spheres), “organizing” immigration (open bar for xenophobia and aporophobia), the “guarantee” of pensions (they want to privatize them), the “strengthening” of public healthcare (they want to cut it even more), and a stellar, dazzling measure, without which the “good people,” who are the ones Feijóo addresses, 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 in school!) the Catalan language. In the clause of the “contract” referring to education, there is also a commitment that candidate Feijóo assumes and that I cannot refrain from reproducing, because it constitutes a singular and enormous absurdity: “[...] education must reward effort, increase requirements, and reinforce the authority of the teacher. The contents will be developed by the royal academies”. The royal academies do not perform nor have they ever performed any type of educational or pedagogical task, and the works they produce have nothing to do with primary or secondary school. Now all that is missing is for the 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 inside a classroom, and even more so in today's classrooms, where a cultural and linguistic diversity gathers that the gentlemen of the PP cannot even imagine, 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 most boring, ignorant, foolish, and discouraging war that the Spanish nationalist right has always waged against linguistic diversity, and very particularly against the Catalan language.

That this still allows them to scrape 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 capable of advancing 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.