Education hires a councilor from the PSC who denied the unity of Catalan

BarcelonaNew movement in the Department of Education. The ministry led by Esther Niubó has signed up the until now first deputy mayor of Rubí, Víctor García Correas, to join the Secretariat for Educational Improvement, as reported by Ràdio Rubí and confirmed by sources from Education to ARA. However, the new signing on Via Augusta has generated controversy and has been criticized by La Intersindical, as last year the person who was also responsible for Education in Rubí made statements against Catalan in a municipal plenary session and apologized shortly after.made statements against Catalan in a municipal plenary session and apologized shortly after.

Specifically, García denied the unity of the language in an intervention to respond to a motion from Alternativa d'Unitat Popular and ERC in Rubí, which requested a contribution from the council to help finance La Bressola schools in Northern Catalonia. "He has a proto-imperialist view of the language. Therefore, what he does is ensure that Catalan is the same as Valencian or Mallorcan; syntactically they are not and they have significant differences, and therefore, he should speak in another forum than this one," García concluded.

Apology and disavowal of the Government

García's statements went viral and ended up being disavowed by the Government of Salvador Illa. The Minister of Linguistic Policy, Francesc Xavier Vila, published a message on X defending the unity of the Catalan language, but without directly referring to the words of the then deputy mayor of Rubí. "Catalans, Valencians and Balearics share the same language. Beyond dialectal differences that enrich us, the experience of millions of people is that we speak, understand and read each other without problems. This is also the framework established by international philology. Moving outside this framework implies entering into another of the "alternative truths" that the extreme right uses to gain space in our societies," the minister defended.

All this led to the Rubí PSC issuing a statement and García making public a letter apologizing for his statements. "My words in the plenary session were not at all appropriate," admitted the councilor. And he added: "I wanted to refer – very unfortunately – to dialectal varieties." Furthermore, he also acknowledged that "with some shame, I didn't even know if there was a debate on this issue" and concluded by stating that "obviously, everything is Catalan, philologically, and in all aspects considered, with its diatopic varieties, which are, by the way, very rich in Catalan".

Finally, García apologized: "I want to offer my most sincere apologies to everyone who felt offended or hurt: it was never my intention. I have learned. From Rubí, we will continue to promote, as we already do, policies to promote and protect the language and make it stronger," he concluded.