Dolors Montserrat, leader of the Spanish People's Party (PP) in Europe and one of the most outspoken voices against Catalonia's linguistic immersion policy and the Catalan language in general, has been caught red-handed. After her massive efforts to attack the language model used in Catalan schools from the European Parliament's petitions committee, which she heads and which commissioned the controversial mission by MEPs to Catalonia in December 2023, she has now admitted that the European bodies do not have the power to legislate on the educational systems of member states or to review the policies with regard to language use, whether national or regional, as she has urged in recent months and years: the mission - boycotted by several European parliamentary groups, and much criticized in Catalonia by the institutions and the entire educational community - ended up calling for Spanish language to be given "equivalent treatment" to Catalan in Catalonia's educational system.
The case of a Greek citizen who debunked Montserrat
It was Diana Riba, MEP from the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and who will head the Republican list in the next elections to the European Parliament, who exposed the PP politician's admission, in a thread on the X social media in which she shares a letter by Dolors Montserrat responding to a citizen who belongs to the Turkish minority in Greece who had demanded a bilingual education in Greek and Turkish for the children who are part of this minority. In other words, he asked the committee to take a position on an education system and its languages, just as the MEPs of the mission that visited Catalonia did.
In her response, Montserrat assures that the European Union "does not have competence to legislate on the organisation of Member States' educational systems", just as the European Commission does not have general competence to review Member States' decisions as regards the teaching and use of national and minority languages". For this reason, Montserrat rejects the citizen's request, since the "Petitions Committee has decided not to pursue the petition further" but she thanks him for exercising his right to petition:
ERC denounces Montserrat's misuse of public resources
"If Dolors Montserrat is so clear that the EU is not competent in this area, why have we been having years of debates, reports and missions based on a request from 2017 that called for an end to the linguistic immersion policy? The misuse of public resources is obvious," complained Riba in a thread published on the X network. In the same vein, she recalled that ERC has for years been denouncing exactly what the PP leader in Europe has now recognized, and she also retrieves a video of the last plenary session of the Petitions Committee, in which the report of the MEPs' mission to Catalonia was debated, which ended up in shouting amongst those present. "If the subject continues to be debated, it is because of political interest for the People's Party, Ciudadanos and Vox and their crusade against the Catalan language", insisted the Republican MEP, although she did not hide her contentedness with the fact that now it was Montserrat herself who had burst the balloon that the right and far-right have inflated against Catalan from the Petitions Committee.