The Government promises to defend Catalan in schools and rules out disobedience.

BarcelonaThe independence movement has taken to the streets this Diada with Catalan as the spearheadbut also with the open wound of the ruling by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) that overturned the decree that protected language immersion in the classroom. All pro-independence parties and organizations protested against a resolution that the Government has already announced that it will tour, but it was the president of the ANC, Lluís Llach, who went a step further call to disobey herHowever, this option is not on the table for the Department of Education. This was confirmed by the regional minister, Esther Niubó, in an interview on SER Catalunya this Friday, in which she also pledged to defend Catalan in schools "with all firmness."

Now, what will the government do to ensure that Catalan remains the language of instruction if the courts force schools to teach more classes in Spanish? "The answer is decisive action by the Catalan government. The president has already announced that we will implement all measures to protect the model. This is the way forward," the minister asserted. In this regard, she expressed her support for the Catalan language. hopeful that the Constitutional Court will endorse the law approved by the Parliament The last legislature, precisely, to avoid the imposition of a 25% Spanish language requirement by this same court. The law was passed in 2022 with the votes of the PSC, Esquerra, Junts, and Comuns, and the Catalan government supplemented it with a decree law that is also awaiting approval from the Court of Guarantees. "It's what truly protects us," said Niubó.

"The country's own language"

In any case, the minister reiterated that, for both the Catalan government and the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party), Catalan is "the language of the country and the education system." Asked whether the government would attend a demonstration in defense of the language promoted by civil society, just as José Montilla's government participated in the mobilizations for the Statute of Autonomous Communities (Estatut de la Estatut), Niubó ruled out advancing any scenarios. However, she reiterated that they will always "stand by the language and a model that has worked."

Meanwhile, the legal services of the Generalitat continue to study the ruling of the TSJC (High Court of Justice) that annulled ten articles of a decree that had already been suspended when the Assembly for a Bilingual School (AEB) appealed it. As Niubó pointed out, this suspension prevented it from being implemented in schools. Therefore, the ruling will not affect the day-to-day operations of schools for now. Among the repealed provisions are those establishing Catalan and Aranese as the vehicular languages and those establishing Catalan as the usual language for teachers and communications with families.

Antich values the Day

Beyond the unitary clamor in defense of Catalan, which was also supported by the PSC and ComunsThe day after the Diada, the first assessments from the organizations arrived after the demonstrations that brought 41,500 people to the streets of Barcelona, ​​​​Girona, ​​and Tortosa. In statements to RAC1, the president of Òmnium, Xavier Antich, highlighted the downward trend in participation figures – last year they were 70,000 – and stressed that those who say they had a pint "are the same ones who, when there were more than a million people, were talking about soufflé." "People returned to the streets and it was once again confirmed that the united call for the Diada demonstration is the largest demonstration of the year in Catalonia," he said. Once again, he called on the political parties to focus on the day-to-day problems of Catalans to prevent "dissatisfaction" from taking hold in society and becoming an opening for the far right to grow.