The Lamine Yamal effect

Among the PP's dialectical tricks to justify defending all the state languages ​​while torpedoing their official status in the EU is, according to Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the "atypical" reality of Spanish in Catalonia. Of course, he's not referring to the fact that Spanish is the mother tongue of 55.5% of the population or that 46.5% have it as their sole habitual language, but rather to the 25% of Catalan spoken in schools, as this is the mother of all the battles Catalan is waging on several fronts. Despite the worrying decline in its social use and the state framework that penalizes dual official status in the judiciary or administration, the presence of Catalan in education has been decisive for its survival, as demonstrated by the unabashed use of the language by young athletes like Lamine Yamal.

The doctrinal shift implemented by the Constitutional Court (CC) following its 2010 ruling on the Statute, which enshrined a kind of dogma of the "inexcusable equality" of all languages, has since legitimized certain judicial decisions that have contributed to their de-officialization, diluting the benefits derived from the notion of a distinct language, and calling into question the linguistic normalization measures conceived at the time to compensate for historical imbalances. The ruling expanded the effects of the duty to know Spanish, which paradoxically does not apply to the other official languages, to the point of delegitimizing the preferential use of Catalan in the Catalan administrations, which the TC itself had defended since the 1990s to "curtail the overwhelming preference" for Spanish. For the High Court, both this and the positive discrimination inherent in language normalization constitute privileged treatment that harms Spanish, despite allowing "proportionate measures" in this regard in education or public service.

It seems that the TC would already have the reports drafted and they would be pending deliberation.

Translating this to the educational sphere, the court determined that Catalan and Spanish must be the primary languages, while reiterating, as it has done since 1994, that Catalan is the "center of gravity" of the educational system, although now with the limitation that "this does not determine the exclusion of Spanish as a teaching language." It is based on a particular interpretation of this ruling, characteristic of militant political activism, that the Supreme Court first and then the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) issued various rulings beginning in 2012 affecting certain schools and requiring—replacing the role of the legislator—that the Generalitat (Catalan Government) regulate the "proportion" of Spanish language use depending on the level of linguistic normalization achieved, warning that one more subject in Spanish was not enough.

The qualitative leap came when, after the 2015-2016 academic year's enrollment decision was challenged, the High Court of Justice (TSJC) "created" 25% of the teaching hours in 2020, generally using the pretext that the Catalan government had neglected its "mandate." Therefore, when the TSJC was preparing to implement this decision, the Parliament, by a large majority, approved Law 8/2022 on the use and learning of official languages ​​in education. This law establishes Catalan as the "normally used language of instruction and learning" and Spanish as the curricular language, as established in the language projects. The criteria for the development of these projects by schools—including the non-application of percentages—and their validation by the Administration were simultaneously regulated in Decree Law 6/2022. Visibly annoyed, the TSJC suspended the execution of the 25% in July 2022 and raised a constitutional challenge to the TC with arguments similar to the appeal filed by the PP and Ciudadanos: in short, that the new legal framework excluded Spanish.

With an adverse ruling on the Law, a new one could be made or it could be modified.

Since then, the mother of all battles has been the two rulings by the Constitutional Court. It seems the reports have already been drafted and are pending deliberation. It has been suggested that the decree-law on the center projects could be declared unconstitutional because the urgency with which it was processed to address the uncertainty created and to provide coverage in the centers is not justified. If so, nothing prevents it from being reiterated in its terms now as an ordinary law, or dispensed with and replaced with a protocol. More worrying would be an adverse ruling on the law. A new one would be necessary or it could be amended. A conforming interpretative ruling could also be issued, in which the Constitutional Court upheld the constitutionality under the terms established by this body. But that might not end the controversy and would allow the High Court of Justice to continue with the implementation of the 25%. We hope that the Court does not deviate at least from what it said in 2010—or in 2023 when it endorsed the Celáa law: the canon of equality between languages ​​should not prevent Catalan from continuing to be the center of gravity of the system, by imperative of the still essential linguistic normalization, and Spanish, as a curricular language, without percentages and in the terms that are pedagogically necessary.