When the current Minister of Culture and Language, José López Campos, took office last May, he announced a change. Fifteen years after the Popular Party of Feijóo and Rueda unilaterally broke the existing parliamentary consensus on Galician, López Campos, from the same party, assured that he intended to recover the agreements on the matter and called for a “Pact for Lingua.” Months have passed and this Tuesday the coordinator of the culture area of the PP leadership, Daniel Chapela, presented his resignation due to, in his opinion, the councilor’s “incompetence” to handle the situation. He did so amidst harsh criticism that he reaffirmed in conversation with elDiario.es: “A stone would be more useful than the current person in charge of Culture and Lingua.” [del Gobierno gallego]”.
Chapela has also left the conservative party, although he will maintain his record as a councilor in Bueu, a town in O Morrazo (Pontevedra) where he was born 25 years ago. “I made the decision after thinking about it for a long time,” he says, but adds that what happened last Sunday broke the camel’s back of his patience. And what happened on Sunday was that thousands of people filled the Praza da Quintana, in Santiago de Compostela, summoned by the Vamos Galego platform, to demand a change of course in the linguistic policy of the Xunta de Galicia. The protest was also attended by opposition leaders, Ana Pontón, from the BNG, and José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, from the PSdeG.
“I do not share the councilor’s criticism of that demonstration. What you have to do is listen, take note and work,” says Chapela, who adds: “You cannot go out and say that, since the PSOE was at the demonstration, it wants monolingualism in Galician.” If you do, consider, you are blowing up bridges, not building them. Nor does he like another of the refrains of the popular argument about the language, the one that accuses the nationalists of the Bloc of “being the Galician police.” “In politics it is important how things are said,” he points out. Especially if you are looking for meeting points. The councilor has already met with the political forces represented in the regional Parliament, but has not advanced specific objectives. Socialists and nationalists demand to repeal the so-called multilingualism decree, promoted by Feijóo and which made Galician in school decline for the first time since the fall of the dictatorship, and to resume – updated – the General Plan for Linguistic Normalization agreed upon in 2004.
The second seems like a mistake to Chapela. “It is a plan from 20 years ago, we need a future for Galician,” he summarizes. The first thing, repealing the regulations approved by Feijóo in 2010, is, in his view, the essential symbolic step to advance in the reconstruction of consensus. “A norm is not going to fix the problems of Galician,” he admits, “but politics is symbolic, and what greater symbolism than not putting barriers to the language.” The 2010 law vetoed the use of Galician in science subjects and limited the subjects that could be taught in that language to one third. But it was the latest report from the Galician Institute of Statistics (IGE) that has caused the recent movements: the Galician Government intensified its speech of implicit rectification, even combined with nods from President Alfonso Rueda to the ultra theses, Vamos Galego organized its demonstration, and a dull malaise – Chapela assures – runs through the popular bases.
“In the Popular Party there is a desire to promote Galician,” he says. The day the IGE published that a third of children between 5 and 14 years old do not know Galician, a figure that has doubled during the Rueda and Feijóo executives, Chapela was having coffee with a Spanish-speaking PP councilor. “I told him the news and his response was ‘something has to be done, we can’t continue like this.’ Many other people in the party have written to me since I made my departure public. There is tiredness of not working more for Galician,” he asserts. Councilor López Campos also addressed him, but through the media. He said that “nothing has changed,” that he did not know Chapela’s reasons and that there were surely ulterior motives. “I’m worried that he’s saying this,” the resigned ironically says, “because he’s announcing a Lingua Pact and then it turns out there’s nothing.”
What there is, in his opinion, is a fundamental ideological issue: a leadership of people who do politics in Galicia thinking about Madrid and not thinking about Galicia. As culture coordinator of the conservative formation, Chapela had requested a meeting with the councilor in April and he did not find a time until Thursday, this Thursday. “I won’t go anymore,” he concludes resignedly.
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