Seven associations denounce “the betrayal” of the Balearic Government: “Prohens should not govern with fear of the street”

The entities PLIS, Societat Civil Balear, Foro Baleares, Sa Fundació, Mos Movem, Impulso Ciudadano Baleares and Escuela de Todos react after the PP, with the support of the left-wing opposition, will annul several Vox linguistic amendments approved by mistake in the Balearic parliament on November 26 and left without effect in the last plenary session of the year.

These amendments included in the administrative simplification decree eliminated, among other things, Catalan as a vehicular language in education, something that was a “red line” for Prohens, who accused Vox of wanting to “take away” Catalan from teaching.

PP and Vox had their budgets on track and both parties had agreed that these 34 amendments would not be approvedbut another 19 were accepted. However, at the time of the vote, the deputy spokesperson for the Popular Parliamentary Group, Marga Durán, gave the wrong indication to the rest of the deputies, who voted in favor against what was agreed. Upon realizing the error, the PP asked to repeat the vote, but Vox refused to do so and celebrated the error as a political victory.

“Unassuming” linguistic issues

From that moment on, Vox’s demands promoted from Madrid were redoubled and focused on linguistic issues “unaffordable” for the PP, which finally led Prohens to withdraw the 2025 budgets in the penultimate plenary session of the year, upon verifying that it was not going to get the support of Vox to achieve the majority of 30 that he needed. Finally, he agreed with the opposition to annul these amendments. in exchange for carrying out several fundamental decrees for the legislature.

This political strategy of the PP has not been understood by the entities defending bilingualism and has generated deep indignation. «If the PP has now decided not to change article 135 of the Education Law and leave mandatory immersion intact, it is simply out of fear of being consistent with its principles, of having to bother the nationalists of the PSOE and MÉS and the pro-independence unions. , buying the motto of educational peace, which is the “peace of the dead” or, worse, “peace of the mafia: with me peace, without me war”criticize the complainant associations, which consider that Prohens’ PP prefers to “leave mandatory immersion intact” instead of being “coherent with its principles and those of its voters.”

«A minimum of Spanish»

During the appearance this Monday, the president of PLIS, Olga Ballester, recalled that the popular deputy Marga Durán, who was wrong when indicating the meaning of the vote on these amendments, was the same one who in 2019 reproached Francina Armengol’s PSOE for not would include “a minimum of Spanish, as the language of instruction in the Islands.”

Ballester does not understand, therefore, that Durán criticized the PSOE for removing Spanish as a vehicular language from the Balearic education law. to please his nationalist partners in Més“and now that you can change this article, perpetuate Armengol’s linguistic immersion.”

It is worth remembering that in the previous legislature chaired by Francina Armengol, PP and PSOE agreed that both languages ​​would be included as vehicular languages ​​in the first Balearic education law. At the last moment, the PSOE withdrew this point, which provoked indignation from the PP, who has always defended a “cordial bilingualism”.

The PP committed in its electoral program to include bilingualism in education, “but now, however, it follows the linguistic model of Catalonia”, contrary to the Spanish Constitution, Olga Ballester deplored.

The civil entities also argued that the amendments that the PP overturned with the support of the left were “coherent” with what Durán declared at the time on behalf of his party. That is to say, Catalan had to stop being the sole language of teaching, sharing its vehicular status with Spanish.

Article 135

Furthermore, they insisted that the Prohens Government should change article 135 of the Autonomous Education Law so that there are no “ambiguities” and so that Catalan and Spanish are teaching languages, as the Constitutional Court says in its ruling on the Celáa Law, in a pattern of balance and equality. Furthermore, he encouraged Prohens to “do not govern with fear of the street”.

On the other hand, these entities denounced that nominative subsidies and project subsidies are granted only to Catalan and pro-independence associations that defend mandatory immersion in Catalan and the exclusive use of Catalan in the administration.

“Either subsidies are given to all the associations or they are withdrawn from all of them,” they proposed after ensuring that none of them has received “not one euro” of public money, while the governments of Armengol and now Prohens ‘water’ the defense associations of mandatory immersion and the expulsion of the Spanish from the administration.

«We consider that continuing to maintain nominative subsidies and project subsidies to Catalan and pro-independence entities and not allocating a euro to non-Catalan or non-independence entities is a fraud and we dare to say that it is due to alleged corruption, since it is being favored with public resources. to an ideological line,” they concluded.