Christmas speech
The president of the Generalitat defends, days after approving the Budgets with En Comú and without the CUP, his long-term strategy
The Christmas speech of the President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, came this year conditioned by two issues: the controversy generated around the ruling that forces Catalan schools to teach at least 25% of their teaching hours in Spanish and the turn given to the legislature with the breakdown of the independence bloc in the approval of the Budgets, which last Thursday went ahead in the Parliament without the CUP and thanks to En Comú. The Republican leader referred to both questions, even indirectly.
The scenography chosen for the intervention, celebrated for the first time on Saint Stephen’s Day, a holiday in Catalonia instead of December 30 as it used to be, was in itself a declaration of intentions. Aragonès spoke from one of the first schools in which linguistic immersion was applied in the mid-eighties, Rosselló Pòrcel, from Santa Coloma de Gramenet, to launch a message in an internal key, to the independence groups themselves, and externally .
A week ago, the head of the Catalan Executive announced that reinforcement teachers would be placed in groups with students who have obtained final sentences to be able to study in Spanish, but he also promised inspections to guarantee that all classes planned in Catalan are taught. “We have to promote the school, its linguistic model, its capacity for cohesion and to generate opportunities because, without any doubt,” he argued this Sunday, “it is the nucleus of the Catalan nation.”
He assures that if the dialogue with the Government does not yield results in 2022, he will look for alternatives
The also leader of ERC placed within this objective the decision to extend free education to children under two years of age from the next academic year. “For the same reason, we are working with all the energy and all the decision to ensure that the Catalan language continues to play a neuralgic role in the educational system of Catalonia,” he remarked.
Negotiation
Subject to criticism from anti-capitalists, with whom last February he reached an investiture agreement that, however, has not had continuity in the negotiation of public accounts, and in permanent friction with his coalition partners and rivals from Junts per Catalunya, Aragonès also insisted that his commitment to self-determination and amnesty for those indicted by the ‘procès’ remains firm. In any case, he defended the path of negotiation with the Government chosen by his party.
The Catalan president assured that 2022 should be the year in which “to unblock the conflict with the State” and in which the dialogue begins to yield “tangible results.” “We must also begin to build alternatives, acting realistically, seeking maximum consensus and learning from the path we have followed so far in case the negotiation stalls and does not bring results,” he said, however, in a very measured way. Because in the same way that we are not willing to give up the democratic resolution of the political conflict, we are not willing to give up independence.
.