The new president of Congress, Francina Armengol, is willing to be very flexible when it comes to accepting that deputies belonging to communities with a co-official language express themselves in catalan, gallego, euskera or valencianbut at least for the moment there will not be the open bar that he implied in his first speech before the Chamber after being elected as the third authority of the State.
This was explained yesterday at the opening meeting of the Legislature held by the Table of Congress. A date in which Armengol rectified by backing down and clarifying that with the announcement he made on Thursday, assuring that the use of the co-official languages in the Chamber would be immediate, what he intended to express was only a “commitment” but not a unilateral decision as the representatives of the PP reproached him, for whom the president cannot simply change the operating rules that all her predecessors have followed. Furthermore, urged to do so, Armengol was unable to cite the article of the Regulations in which she allegedly supported the decision that she made explicit before the Plenary.
In this sense, the president of Congress now maintains that she will undertake consultations and conversations with all groups in the Chamber to gauge the scope of your proposal and, in addition, it will request the appropriate legal and technical reports to assess how far it can come true. In an informal conversation with journalists, he assured that his intention on this matter is to “seek consensus” and “technical efficiency.”
The truth is that expanding the use of languages in an institution such as the Congress of Deputies is a complex task that goes beyond planning a simultaneous translation service.
The parliamentary sources consulted coincide in pointing out the practical impossibility of extending the free use of co-official languages to the entire legislative process. They do point out, however, that it would be feasible to design a system similar to that practiced in the Senatethe chamber of territorial representation, where senators can present and debate non-legal motions or proposals in the languages of their respective communities but, for example, it is not allowed to use them, beyond a few sentences, in a control session at Government or in a full debate.