Since in politics, as in life generally, the only way to analyze and appraise an agreement that has been reached is through its results, one has to conclude that it is bad news that Catalan was not approved as an official language of the European institutions in the meeting of the General Affairs Council of the EU. It is known that the Spanish government and its foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, attempted everything with his community colleagues and there is the expectation that at the next meeting on October 24th in Brussels it will be different. But that's not how it is today, and considering that the Spanish government made an agreement with president Carles Puigdemont that it would push forward the issue of the official status of Catalan in the EU and, thanks to this commitment, Together for Catalonia (Junts) provided it with the seven votes that it required to ensure that the Socialist (PSOE) candidate Francina Armengol would become speaker of Congress, Pedro Sánchez will have to turn this 'no' into a 'yes' if he wants to remain in the government palace for another term.
As the weeks have gone by, the idea of an international verifier of the agreements between the PSOE and Junts is reinforced. What kind of agreement could have a solid foundation, between two parties in which mutual distrust prevails, without an independent person to check that the pacts being signed are fulfilled? Given that the Spanish government's commitment to achieving the official status of Catalan in the EU was firm and everything is now on stand-by, and this was an issue that had to be resolved this Tuesday and then to enter the investiture phase, the Socialists will have to get busy. Resolve the issue of Catalan in the EU, agree on the amnesty and accept the issue of the verifier. All this before a hypothetical investiture of Sánchez that cannot be extended beyond the end of November.
With the clock ticking, it can't be said that this Tuesday was a bad day for Catalan. Addresses were given for the first time in the Congress of Deputies, in Catalan, Galician and Basque, and from now on it will always be like this. It's a significant advance that highlights how dynamics that seemed thoroughly embedded can be altered if votes are used appropriately. It was a precondition for the European officiality, although the latter will have to be finalized in October. Albares went to Brussels to convince his colleagues of the need to add three more languages to the list of official languages and the matter has been put aside while new legal opinions are awaited. It's not a no, but it's not a yes either. Surely, Spain will have learned the lesson that it is easier to use the rotating presidency of the EU to straighten out an issue when there is a single language than when there are three.
At the end of the day, the situation of Catalan is different from that of Galician and Basque both in terms of the number of speakers and the fact that the former is the only one of the three languages that is already the language of a European state, Andorra. Catalan is spoken by around ten million people, including citizens of four states: Andorra, Spain, France and Italy. A situation very different from that of the 700,000 speakers of Basque and the two million who speak Galician. There may well be a two-speed granting of official EU status in which Catalan is given the green light in October, and Basque and Galician are left for later. Albares has already begun to move discreetly in this direction, since the complexity of the political majority that Sánchez needs for his investiture prevents him from leaving anyone unhappy.
In the end, everyone here will have to play their cards and set their priorities. And Puigdemont seems willing to lower the language a notch to facilitate dialogue, but not to lower his political goals. For its part, the Spanish executive would do well not to confuse one thing with the other if they do not want to slip up by failing to properly measure the margin for negotiation they have with the interlocutor opposite them. Because they have certainly been warned.