Spain’s right wing boycotts minority languages spoken in parliament

OVIEDO, Spain

Spain’s right-wing parties continued to boycott the use of minority languages in the nation's parliament on Thursday. 

In the second parliamentary session in Spain’s history where languages like Catalan, Galician, and Basque are permitted, members of the Popular Party and Vox continued refusing to wear earpieces to hear the translations into Spanish.

On Tuesday, during the first session, far-right Vox party politicians stormed out of parliament when a politician started speaking Galician. As they left, they dropped their earpieces around the seat of acting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

On Thursday, a Socialist politician speaking Catalan joked that he would be speaking Catalan for a while, so told Vox they had time to go to their favorite place – a nearby bar.

Popular Party politician Borja Semper was slammed by members of his party for speaking Basque during Tuesday's session. On Thursday, he limited the use of Basque to "ugun on," the expression for "good morning."

The right-wing politicians say that the move to allow new languages in Spain’s government is purely about Sanchez pandering to separatist parties to form a government.

Yet, the measure is being hailed as a historic advance by others, especially some of Spain's approximate 10 million minority language speakers, who account for more than one-fifth of the country's population.

"They have been censoring and repressing us all our lives. I have not been able to study in my language and the Aragonese do not have full linguistic rights," said left-wing politician Jorge Pueyo in Aragonese, a language with around 12,000 speakers left. “I ask for respect for my language… Spain doesn’t have one common language, but many common languages.”

On Thursday, Spanish politicians voted to definitively allow the use of Spain’s co-official languages in official government settings. The motion passed by a margin of 170-180 votes, with one of the yes votes cast by a Galician member of the Popular Party, Rosa Quintana.

The debate comes less than a week before Spain’s Parliament is set to vote on the investiture of the Popular Party’s Alberto Nunez Feijoo.

Spain’s king selected the conservative politician as the first choice to form a government, but due to his hard-line stance on Spain’s regionalist groups, which hold the balance of power, his chances of mustering up majority support in Parliament are increasingly slim.