Many have been astonished by the People's Party's maneuver to prevent Catalan from becoming official in the European institutions: it's the language of many of its leaders, they exclaim. Feijóo himself is speaking Galician, they point out. And they ask: how is it possible that someone would vote against the recognition of their own language?
These are reasonable reflections, but those who formulate them may not have paid much attention to the PP's language policy throughout its history, both when in government and when in opposition. Nor should they pay attention to how the PP behaves with Catalan in the communities that have it as their own language. Two pieces of news today: in the Balearic Islands, the PP government, with the support of Vox, is using a housing decree to shield the elimination of Catalan as a requirement in public healthcare (they have been repeating for a few days, lying, that the Constitutional Court has ruled in their favor on this issue). The housing decree, incidentally, is also a measure that encourages speculation and the wholesale destruction of the territory. In the Valencian Community, the infamous Mazón approves his budget with the help of Vox: they are a shameful budget, which includes, among other things, a drastic cut in resources for Valencian and the Valencian Academy of Language. "What we want is the strangulation to death of the Valencian Academy of Language," declared a far-right troglodyte. Well, here it is.
The president of the Balearic Islands, Marga Prohens, is a Catalan speaker and expresses herself fluently, almost correctly, in Catalan. So is Mazón, and many of the leaders of the PP on the islands and in Valencia. If you ask them if they hate Catalan or have anything against it, they will emphatically answer no, not at all. But this doesn't stop them from pursuing policies that seek to marginalize, subordinate, and ultimately eliminate Catalan from the public sphere: strangulation to death, to put it in the flowery language of the Vox patriot. This is what the PP has always done: it now has the excuse of needing to make concessions to Vox (an equally false need, because the PP could reach agreements with other political forces to exclude the far right from governance). But Vox, in addition to having become an excuse for being a bad payer, is also the PP's direct competitor within the same political space, that of the ultra-nationalist right. Most of the time, Vox simply publicly expresses the opinions that PP members share privately. It doesn't aggravate them: they're the same. Out of conviction, political calculation, or pure self-loathing.
The PP is the party that was born directly from the ideological legacy of Franco's regime, and is therefore fiercely opposed to linguistic diversity, which it literally understands as an attack on the unity of Spain. Forgetting this (or pretending, as the right does, that the PP distracts us from the true, sly enemy of the Spanish left), through carelessness or self-interest, is a problem because it forces us to start the discussion all over again.
