Around 60 former deputies, including former ministers of the PSOE, the PP and UCD, have expressed their “stupor” and “dismay” at the approval of the use of Catalan, Galician and Basque in the plenary sessions of Congress. They have done so through a letter sent to the president of the institution, Francina Armengol, in which they also censure that the change is being carried out “in a scandalously hasty manner” and “with the breaking of a golden rule of demoliberal parliamentarism”: that the modifications to the Regulations have “broad agreement among the groups , as has always happened.”
“The claim that half of the Chamber imposes such a far-reaching reform is an unacceptable travesty, a true breach of the rules of any democratic system,” they point out in their letter regarding a measure that has been approved by the party. of Pedro Sanchez and its coalition partner, Sumar, despite the vote against the PP, to satisfy the demands of the pro-independence and nationalist parties regarding a possible re-election of the acting president.
According to this group of former parliamentarians, Spanish has been the language in which all of them have dialogued, debated and fulfilled their mission “with total normality” for years. In this sense, they point out that “the true intention of its promoters is to deny the condition of Spanish as a common language of the Spanish” and consider that the fact that the deputies have to “use the helmet or the earpiece to understand each other” will be an image that “distances politics from the normal life of Spaniards.”
“We want to express our firmest rejection of a reform of the Regulations that contradicts our Constitution, does not adapt to our linguistic reality and is not reasonable,” they maintain in their writing. For this reason, they urge the current members of the Carrera de San Jerónimo chamber to reject an initiative that “would change the nature” of the Lower House and “would produce a serious constitutional mutation aimed at its transformation into a plurinational reality“.
Among the signatories are former socialist ministers (José Luis Corcuera y Virgilio Zapatero), popular (Juan Carlos Aparicio, Miguel Arias Cañete, Rafael Catala, Maria Dolores de Cospedal, Isabel García Tejerina, Jesus Posada, Isabel Tocino y Federico Trillo) and UCD (Rafael Arias-Salgado, Soledad Becerril, Ignacio Camuñas, Jaime Lamo de Espinosa y Rodolfo Martin Villa) and former presidents of the Senate Juan José Laborda y Javier Rojoamong others.