The far-right Vox party will force a vote on the application of Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, allowing central government to impose direct rule over an autonomous community, given the absence of any steps by the Catalan government to comply with the recent Supreme Court ruling which guarantees that 25% of education in Catalonia must be in Spanish. That is what is stated in the motion that Vox has registered in the Spanish lower house, arising from a question put by the far-right party to the Spanish government on Wednesday. The text will be debated and voted on in the parliamentary session scheduled for the third week in December.
Specifically, the Vox initiative urges the Spanish government to take direct control over the Catalan administration in order to ensure full respect and compliance with constitutional principles which, it argues, are subject to "systematic infringement" by Catalan government.
This initiative came after the leader of the extreme right party in Catalonia, Ignacio Garriga, had already asked for the suspension of Catalonia's autonomy over this same issue. Garriga added that it is "extremely serious" that "institutional separatism" give support to protests called by the pro-Catalan immersion platform Somescola against the Supreme Court's ruling and stressed that the Catalan government is thus in "rebellion", making it more necessary than never to "guarantee the rights of Catalans which are being violated by the separatist mafia".
"Profound intervention"
The far-right party claims that "it is intolerable" that there are parts of Spain in which "thousands" of children cannot learn to read and write "in their mother tongue, in Spanish, only because sectarian politicians deny it" and therefore considers that "the only way to return the legitimate rights of all Catalans and freedom is this profound intervention".
Vox also called on the Spanish government to promote the necessary reforms to ensure teaching of the Spanish language and, more generally, in the Spanish language, in education systems throughout Spain in order to satisfy "the duty of Spaniards to know it as well as to protect the right that everyone has to use it".
In addition, the party calls for a regime of penalties for those who obstruct or impede effective compliance with Article 3 of the Constitution, which states that "Castilian is the official Spanish language of the state".
As well, the motion registered by Vox, third largest party in the Spanish Congress, makes a call to reverse the "instrumentalization" that it claims different public authorities carry out of the languages in the Spanish state, using them "as an element of division and confrontation between territories and between Spaniards". Finally, the party led by Santiago Abascal calls for the encouragement of "special respect and protection" within the constitutional framework for the cultural heritage which "the different linguistic modalities of Spain" provide.
Main image: The chamber of Spain's Congress of Deputies / Photo: Europa Press