More than 46 years have gone by since the first democratic election in Spain, on June 15th, 1977, and since the Christian democrat Fernando Álvarez de Miranda was elected, one month later, speaker of the Congress of Deputies. Since that date, 12 other people have held the position of speaker of Congress, two of them Catalan - Landelino Lavilla (1979-1982) and Meritxell Batet (2019-2023) - and two more - Félix Pons (1989-1996) and Francina Armengol, who has just started her mandate - from the Balearic Islands, and on all occasions, without exception, the MPs who wanted to speak in Catalan from the podium were prevented. Sometimes even forcefully and unpleasantly. How could simultaneous translation possibly be provided when castellano - Spanish - was the common language, it was argued from the speaker's chair. Or with the line that "Congress cannot be a Tower of Babel". Those most passionate became emboldened, asserting that the use of other languages was illegal, that the regulations did not allow it and that the MPs would not wear headphones at the sessions of the Spanish lower house. In short, that it was impossible and would never happen.
Well, this whole discourse has collapsed like a house of cards, as if those newspaper records never existed, even to an extent that borders on shamelessness and amnesia, and with the Socialists (PSOE) and Sumar at the head, the Bureau of Congress has registered a proposal to reform the rules of the chamber, requesting under an urgent procedure with a single reading that certain articles be modified so that Catalan - also Basque and Galician — can be spoken and used in all areas of parliamentary activity, including oral speeches and written submissions. All this has to be approved before September 19th, the day on which the Council of the European Union will consider the official status of the same three languages in the European institutions. It is still curious, to avoid using a stronger qualifier, that a resistance of more than 46 years is to be heard and defeated in an urgent single-reading parliamentary procedure by the honourable members of Congress.
But all of this, as it is not superfluous to remember, is not the result of chance, nor of coincidence, but of parliamentary arithmetic and of putting the issue on the table when the governing bodies of Congress were to be constituted and the votes were able to decant majorities towards the People's Party (PP) or towards the PSOE. The Socialists have paid a toll, it is as though they have had to receive the cobrador de frac, the top-hat wearing debt collector, and for some the price will not be much and for others it will be a lot, but, almost half a century later, Catalan MPs will be able to express themselves in their own language if they so wish. Which we hope will be the case, at least among the parliamentarians of the pro-independence parties and hopefully also among those who consider themselves Catalanists. I know that the difficulties of Catalan will not be solved with this action, that would be all too easy, and that the important thing is that it recovers everything it has lost as a social language, but the initiative of the Congress not only does not hinder, it clearly helps.
Coincidentally, or at least that's what one might think, the presentation of the amendment to the chamber's regulations took place a few hours before the speakers of Congress in the previous legislature, the Catalan Socialist (PSC) deputy Meritxell Batet, announced rather surprisingly that she is leaving the political front line and resigning as an MP after 19 years in the house. Batet was the leader of the Catalan Socialists list in the Spanish election of July 23rd, which once again placed the PSC as the largest party in Catalonia with more than a million votes and 19 seats. In the last legislature, the now ex-deputy had several clashes with members over the use of Catalan and a very inflexible attitude. On her watch there was also the hastiness with which she stripped the MPs' seats from Catalan pro-independence deputies Oriol Junqueras, Jordi Sànchez, Jordi Turull and Josep Rull, who were then in prison, a move that Batet made after asking the opinion of the Supreme Court and the Congressional lawyers and without waiting for a pronouncement from the Constitutional Court.
Now, she will see from her home in Madrid, where she lives, how Catalan is spoken in Congress and she will verify that no problem is caused and the world continues to turn. And that politics is indeed able to change chronically-entrenched practices that seem immovable.