The face-to-face debate between Spain's prime minister Pedro Sánchez and the opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo held this Tuesday in the Senate can be summed up in the inability of the Spanish right to introduce new arguments into its political agenda beyond those connected to that old doozie of a lie about Catalan children being unable to learn Spanish at schools in Catalonia, or about what each party did when Catalonia's autonomous government was suspended and direct rule under Article 155 was applied, when the one thing that is certain is that both of them, PSOE and PP, were on the same side. Not even the fact that Ciudadanos (Cs), the party that put on the table the false repression of the Spanish language in Catalonia, is disappearing from the political scene - according to the predictions of a Catalonia election poll - will bring about a minimal return to normality and avoid the fake news flag from continuing to be raised, taking advantage of an issue in which very few families want to turn their particular situation into the category of a general problem.
When Ciudadanos was created in Barcelona in 2006, under the false flag of being a liberal party, the language issue was the only thing that united the promoters. A topic that has always found media take-up in Madrid, as it affects important civil service sectors such as the army, judges, state solicitors, tax inspectors and officials at the highest administrative level. All of this, together with an uncompromising right that also exists in Catalonia and that in 1977 agreed, partly out of fear, that a bilingualism could exist, but as they gradually saw that the political reform allowed them to continue holding some power, they were encouraged to discreetly come out of the closet on this and other issues. The Planeta media group was the main lever, through the Antena 3 network, and then, Telecinco, El Mundo, ABC and La Razón quickly positioned Cs leader Albert Rivera as the model for a good Spaniard in Catalonia, blowing to bits the policy of a certain containment that the PP had followed until Cs was born. This unity against the Catalan school system immediately uprooted the PP and a short time later the PSOE as well, which was also unable to hold on to its historical positions.
For Feijóo to resort to the lie that Catalan schoolchildren do not learn Spanish at school is only following in the footsteps of José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy or emblematic ministers such as José Ignacio Wert, responsible for the famous phrase that it was "necessary to Spanishize Catalan children". This is the mentality of the Spanish right and also of a certain left that is silent today because of the complex parliamentary arithmetic in the Congress of Deputies, where the votes of the PSOE and Unidas Podemos are insufficient to guarantee the passing of legislation in the Spanish Cortes and the stability of the executive. But there are still barons like the Socialist leader of Aragón, Javier Lambán, and the EU high representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, at the ready. This fierce defence of Spanish as the only language ends up being decisive in Spanish politics.
Thus, the Senate and the Congress are prevented from being parliamentary chambers in which any language other than Spanish can be spoken, with disparaging remarks about Catalan being of little use if you can speak a language "with which we all understand each other", and the European Parliament is asked very quietly by the Spanish executive to consider the use of Catalan in its own chamber. And thus the routine continues, wheeling out of the closet arguments that have already been debated hundreds of times without any progress for Catalan and that always lead to a discourse full of demagoguery and the absolute opposite of a country in which several languages are spoken and where they all have official status. While all this is happening, Catalonia does not gain anything, it is simply being used in their battles. So much so, that what may seem like a victory today, is what has always been a defeat in the past and, at best, after enormous effort all that is achieved is a return to the starting point.