Get out your handkerchiefs, this is a very sad story. Antonio Gallego, a member of parliament for the far-right Vox party in the Parliament of Catalonia, took his children on a camping holiday and met a Basque boy who only speaks Basque. That is, a five-year-old boy who currently only speaks his own mother tongue, and not Spanish.
This is "Julen, a boy from Guipúzcoa, unable to play with other children because he does not speak a word of Spanish," said the Vox MP on Twitter. And "not a word" of Spanish, Gallego underlined. “It is very sad that toxic separatism impoverishes so many Julens in this way,” he lamented.
The far-right parliamentarian found it "very sad" that a child who would not yet have started compulsory primary education only speaks the language of his family, euskera, that is, Basque. “He doesn’t hear Spanish at home or at school,” he wrote. This is, in fact, hard to believe, as Spanish is present in the vast majority of television channels and of audiovisual content available on the internet and digital media in all parts of the Spanish state. And when kids begin the first cycle of primary education - at the age of six - schools are also required to incorporate the Castilian language as a subject.
In fact, the results of the latest sociolinguistic survey from the Basque Country do not indicate the existence of such cases of children who only speak Basque. In 2021 the socialization of children only in a minority and minoritized language has become impossible, both in the Basque Country and in Catalonia.
It is impossible to know exactly what situation Gallego witnessed that prompted this anecdote, but it seems clear enough that he sought to create controversy on the social media. His second tweet anticipates just this development, with its last phrase:"Follow the freak Basque lynching here," ending with a downward arrow. Accordingly the word ‘Julen’ has been a trending topic on Twitter this weekend.
However, many have responded to the far-right MP's "sad story" by clarifying the current sociolinguistic situation: like all children in the Spanish state, Julen will inevitably end up learning Spanish because of its dominant presence in the vast majority of areas of everyday life. But on top of that, he is likely to learn more languages than children typically do in much of Spain. Some Twitter users questioned whether the boy actually exists: "Julen Inventxea", some wrote. A play on words, which mixes the verb "invent" with the Basque root "txea".
Vox MP in the Catalan Parliament
Other social media users commented how strange it is that these anecdotes are only observed by people on the right or far right of Spanish politics. Some even hinted that perhaps it was Julen himself who did not want to speak Spanish because he was reluctant to relate to Gallego's children.
Antonio Gallego was born in Barcelona in 1975. He is a Catalan politician and economist who was a member of the Congress of Deputies and the Parliament of Catalonia for the Popular Party. He was also a councillor for the El Prat municipality, but left politics in 2015 for health reasons. Then he reappeared this year on the Vox lists for the Catalan elections of February 14th.
Main image: A group of children riding bicycles at a camping ground in Catalonia / ACN