Life is full of contradictions. This Monday, Spain argued in the UN Committee on Information in favour of multilingualism and the freedom of the press:
ante Comité de Información apuesta por el #multilingüismo en @ONU_es y la defensa de la #LibertaddePrensa pic.twitter.com/Iy86CSRBsa
— España en la ONU (@SpainUN) 22 d’octubre de 2018
Only reading this news story, it doesn't seem that strange: a country defending multilingualism. But, just five days ago, the Spanish government refused to ask president Antonio Tajani to allow the use of Catalan in the European Parliament. It's taken less than a week for Sánchez's executive to contradict itself.
The government argued it would be too expensive to introduce Catalan. They said that, although the European institutions generally hold "an open attitude towards regional languages", they've always considered it "unviable" for these languages to have a presence in all bodies "for the high cost".
On 16th January 2017, however, Tajani had written a letter saying that, if he received a letter from Spain asking for Catalan to be available for use in the chamber, he "wouldn't raise any obstacle to it being approved and would use all the means at his disposal" for the use of Catalan in the chamber "to be approved as soon as possible". Catalan has more total speakers than a number of official EU languages, for example, Danish, Finnish and Croatian.