When Operation Catalonia had still not begun - that of Fernández Díaz, Villarejo and company - which, if we had to place it on a tentative date, would be between the first and second quarter of 2012, a few months before the first major mobilization on the Diada, September 11th, called by the ANC and by Òmnium, what already existed was Operation Catalan. That is, the operation aimed at making Catalonia's own language lose its situation as a vehicular language in education, a status that has always bothered the right-wing of Spanish politics and media, as well as the wider world of the judiciary - much less so, the world of finance and business - that in Spain, the idea that the Castilian or Spanish language was not the only important language and Catalan could be more than just anecdotal created a lot of animosity.
José María Aznar had the issue in mind in the electoral campaign of 1996, but Jordi Pujol intervened, as his votes were necessary to form a government, and the PP president paid a very high sum to reach the Moncloa government palace; by delivering the head of the PP's Vidal-Quadras, by not touching a single comma of the legislation on the Catalan language, through the development of the Catalan police with enough officers to take responsibility for traffic, as well as other competences in regional funding and in prisons, the suppression of civil governors, of the state's real counter-powers against the autonomous communities, and the end of compulsory military service. It was, by far, the best autonomous government agreement - that's what we are talking, a deal with an autonomous government - reached between Catalonia and the Spanish government between 1980 and 2022.
So much so, that Aznar's discomfort with the toll he had paid in 1996 led him, when he obtained an absolute majority in the Spanish Congress in 2000, to fiercely apply the programme of maximums he had been thinking of since 1993, when he competed for the first time against Felipe González. Then, a start was made on the idea of a recentralizing Spain with regard to competencies, a privatizing Spain with respect to state companies and one based on monolingualism, using Spanish of course; this began to be implemented. It would, however, be in 2011, with Mariano Rajoy as prime minister and José Ignacio Wert in the culture ministry, that the accelerator would be stepped on and the Wert law would start to put Catalonia's linguistic immersion policy in check, check, check, time and time again.
It would not be until the Celaá education law, in 2020, that a minimal loophole was opened in the straight jacket of the Wert law, since it allowed, or so the Catalan government understands it, the avoidance of the obligation to teach 25% of classes in Spanish. The result of this is the law approved by the Catalan Parliament with the agreement of ERC, Junts and the PSC, which makes concessions with respect to Spanish to avoid the Catalan High Court (TSJC) quota ruling and which, in this latest decision, has been validated by the Supreme Court. Because, in fact, what the Supreme Court has ruled is the annulment of the language projects of two schools in Barcelona and Abrera because they did not comply with the 25% Spanish language quota in education, but in accordance with the earlier legislation, not that approved by Parliament a few months ago and on which the Constitutional Court has not yet ruled.
In short, this battle has been underway for a good while, and thus, the Spanish state is not going to give in, because they have already tried it with Aznar and Rajoy, and it worked out well for them. They have the judiciary and the media in their favour and a current of sympathy in Spain, in which part of the left participates. And yes, the Catalan language does not have it easy.