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One must have really lost sight of the real world to consider taking the LOMLOE education law -popularly known as the Celáa lawto Spain’s Constitutional Court due to it, supposedly, putting Castilian (Spanish) language teaching at risk. Only the change in paradigm of an ever more extremist right wing -which makes of all identity issues its battle cry- could have led to such an absurdity. Rather than protecting Castilian, it seeks to put an end to Catalonia's long-standing educational policy of immersion in Catalan and transform the Catalan language into a token one. The Popular Party (PP) kept its promise to take the law to the Constitutional Court. Perhaps this might get them a few votes in the upcoming Madrid elections, but what the party led by Pablo Casado forgets, is that by acting like this it will only get into La Moncloa palace if it achieves a majority together with the far-right wing party VOX, since the other political parties which recently facilitated the investitures of several Popular Party candidates to governing posts will not be able to come near them.

Mariano Rajoy’s PP already issued -back in his days- a demand against the Catalan Statute of Autonomy, starting an irreversible rise in anti-Catalan sentiment around Spain. Years later, the decision was considered to be wrong by Rajoy, although he never truly understood the importance of the Catalan language is for the people of Catalonia. The PP returns to the fray, at a time when Spanish courts try to reduce the policy of immersion in Catalan, reverting the model and increasing the usage of Castilian in Catalan schools. The Catalan High Court (TSJC) has annulled the teaching plans of two    schools because they included Catalan as the only teaching language in the classroom, which shows to what extent the Celaá law -which theoretically protects Catalonia's long-standing educational policy of immersion in Catalan- could become scrap paper if left up to the courts.

This linguistic wrestling competition is shaping up to be one of the major conflicts in the immediate future. Mainly because the Catalan language took an enormous step back in the last few years, both quantitively and qualitatively, and there has been a reduction in the use of the language. According to a report by Plataforma per la Llengua –an NGO promoting the use of Catalan– in urban secondary schools, only 14.6% of break time conversations are in Catalan. This decrease caused the experts to talk about a Catalan language emergency.

It is hoped that the Catalan pro-independence government -which is expected to be formed in the first fortnight of April- will set the reinforcement of Catalan in schools as one of its main priorities, and be ready to fight to revert the current situation. Catalan has always been the backbone of the Catalan nation, and it must be placed back at the core of the debate if we do not want it to fade into a marginal and folkloric issue.